Chronic Pain Harms The Brain

What is Chronic Pain

While acute pain is a normal sensation triggered in the nervous system to alert you to possible injury and
the need to take care of yourself, chronic pain is different. Chronic pain persists. Pain signals keep firing in
the nervous system for weeks, months, even years. There may have been an initial mishap -- sprained back,
serious infection, or there may be an ongoing cause of pain -- arthritis, cancer, ear infection, but some
people suffer chronic pain in the absence of any past injury or evidence of body damage. Many chronic
pain conditions affect older adults. Common chronic pain complaints include headache, low back pain,
cancer pain, arthritis pain, neurogenic pain (pain resulting from damage to the peripheral nerves or to the
central nervous system itself), psychogenic pain (pain not due to past disease or injury or any visible sign of
damage inside or outside the nervous system).

Chronic Pain and Brain




Comparison of brains - These images show the brain from the left side,
demonstrating striking differences between chronic pain patients and
healthy subjects. They illustrate with colors how much activation (red-yellow)
or deactivation (dark/light blue) was found at each location.

 


In a new study - investigators at North western University's Feinberg School of Medicine have identified a clue
that may explain how suffering long-term pain could trigger these other pain-related symptoms.

Researchers found-that in a healthy brain all the regions exist in a state of equilibrium. When one region is active,
the others quiet down. But in people with chronic pain, a front region of the cortex mostly associated with emotion
"never shuts up," said Dante Chialvo, lead author and associate research professor of physiology at

the Feinberg School. "The areas that are affected fail to deactivate when they should."

One of the student and colleagues- used functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) to scan the brains of
people with chronic low back pain and a group of pain-free volunteers while both groups were tracking a moving
bar on a computer screen. The study showed the pain sufferers performed the task well but "at the expense of using
their brain differently than the pain-free group," One of the student said.


Adapted from materials provided by Northwestern University