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Is the brain hard-wired for pain?

Is the brain hard-wired for pain?

Analysis of white matter sheds new light on chronic pain

 

 

 

The last thing anyone in pain wants to hear is that “it’s all in your head.” But a new study, published this month in Pain, revealed that some chronic pain might, quite literally, depend on the state of the brain. Analyzing the brain structure of chronic pain sufferers may help explain why some people recover quickly from an injury while others experience ongoing pain. Researchers think these findings could lead to more specialized pain treatment.
Physical pain is one of the most universal forms of human stress. But not all pain is created equally. While acute pain is a temporary reaction of the nervous system to disease or other threats to the body, chronic pain is different. Signals keep firing in the nervous system even after an injury has healed.
“Everyone will experience acute pain,” explained Vania Apkarian, professor of physiology at Northwestern University in Chicago and senior author of the study. “But only some develop chronic pain and until now, no one understood why.”
According to a recent report by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), an organization associated with the National Academy of Sciences, chronic pain affects nearly 100 million Americans. That’s more than heart disease, diabetes and cancer combined.
“While pain can be a symptom of another condition, when it becomes chronic, it can be a disease in its own right,” said Sean Mackey, chief of Pain Management at Stanford University in California and co-author of the IOM report.
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read the entire article here

Source: Scienceline.org November 2013






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