Chronic Pain Harms Brain Wiring
Chronic Pain Harms Brain's Wiring
FRIDAY, Feb. 8 (HealthDay News) -- Chronic
pain can disrupt brain function and cause problems such
as disturbed sleep, depression, anxiety and difficulty making simple decisions, a
U.S. study finds.
Researchers at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of
Medicine in Chicago used functional MRI to scan brain activity in people with
chronic low back pain while they tracked a moving bar on a computer screen. They
did the same thing with a control group of people with no pain.
In those with no pain, the brain regions displayed a state of
equilibrium. When one region was active, the other regions calmed down. But in
people with chronic pain, the front region of the cortex mostly associated with
emotion "never shuts up," study author Dante Chialvo, an associate research
professor of physiology, said in a prepared statement.
This region remains highly active, which wears out neurons and
alters their connections to each other. This constant firing of neurons could
cause permanent damage.
"We know when neurons fire too much they may change their
connections with other neurons or even die, because they can't sustain high
activity for so long," Chialvo said.
"If you are a chronic pain patient, you have pain 24 hours a
day, seven days a week, every minute of your life. That permanent perception of
pain in your brain makes these areas in your brain continuously active. This
continuous dysfunction in the equilibrium of the brain can change the wiring
forever and could hurt the brain," Chialvo explained.
These changes "may make it harder for you to make a decision or
be in a good mood to get up in the morning. It could be that pain produces
depression and the other reported abnormalities, because it disturbs the balance
of the brain as a whole," he said.
The study was published in the Feb. 6 issue of The Journal of
Neuroscience.
Chialvo said the findings show that, along with finding new ways
to treat pain, it's also important to develop methods to evaluate and prevent
disruption of brain function caused by chronic pain.
-- Robert Preidt
SOURCE: Northwestern University, news release,
Feb. 5, 2008
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