Chronic Pain Predicted By Brain's Emotional Response

Featured Article Academic Journal Main Category: Pain / Anesthetics Also Included In: Neurology / Neuroscience Article Date: 02 Jul 2012 - 5:00 PDT

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Writing about their work in a Brief Communication in Nature Neuroscience, A Vania Apakarian, professor of physiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago in the US, and colleagues, show for the first time that the more cross-talk there is between two particular brain regions, the greater the chance of the pain becoming chronic.

The two parts of the brain they refer to are the insula, which is active when people have emotional responses to events, and the nucleus accumbens, which plays a role in teaching the brain how to respond to changes in the environment.

Apakarian, whose lab has been researching chronic back pain in relation to changes in brain activity for quite a while, told the press:

"For the first time we can explain why people who may have the exact same initial pain either go on to recover or develop chronic pain."

"The injury by itself is not enough to explain the ongoing pain. It has to do with the injury combined with the state of the brain. This finding is the culmination of 10 years of our research," he added.

In previous studies, researchers have compared the brains of people with chronic back pain to those of healthy people, but due to limitations of study design it has not been possible to pinpoint the factors that drive the pain's chronic nature.

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Chronic Pain Predicted By Brain's Emotional Response