Advertisement

They said chronic pain seems to alter the way people process information that is unrelated to pain.

Many other issues
Dante Chialvo, a researcher at Northwestern University in Chicago who worked on the study, said: "People with chronic pain - meaning pain that lasts more than six months after their injury - have many other issues that affect their quality of life as much as pain. It is not known where they come from."

Recent studies have shown that in healthy people, certain regions of the brain take over during a resting state, something known as a default mode network. "It takes care of your brain when your brain is at rest," Chialvo said in a telephone interview.

When a person performs a task, this network quiets down, he said, but not in people with chronic pain.

Equilibrium disrupted
Instead, a front region of the cortex mostly associated with emotion is constantly active, disrupting the normal equilibrium.

To study this activity, Chialvo did a type of brain scan known as functional magnetic resonance imaging on 15 people with chronic back pain and 15 healthy people.

They gave their volunteers a simple attention task - tracking a moving bar on a computer screen - to observe the brain shifting out of default mode to handle the task.

Both groups performed the task well, but when they measured areas of the brain activated, differences emerged.

"Where we were surprised is the difference in how much brain they used to do the task compared with the healthy group. It was 50 times larger," Chialvo said.

They said disruptions in this default network could explain why pain patients have problems with attention, sleep disturbances and even depression.

"These findings suggest that the brain of a chronic pain patient is not simply a healthy brain processing pain information, but rather it is altered by the persistent pain in a manner reminiscent of other neurological conditions associated with cognitive impairments," they wrote. – (Reuters Health)

Read more:
Pain Centre

February 2008
 

Print this article on

Rate this article Poor 1 2 3 4 5 Excellent

JOBS

Cost / Clinical Audit Clerk (Medical Aid) Western Cape Pharmacist Western Cape Occupational Health Nurse x 2 Mpumalanga Operations Manager R20,000-25,000 Per Month Cost To Company Incl Benefits Gauteng - East Rand Java Developer-CT Western Cape - Cape Town Java Developer-Jozi Gauteng Lab Technician R3,500-4,200 Per Month Cost To Company Incl Benefits Gauteng - East Rand Surfacing Operator R3,900 Per Month Cost To Company Gauteng - East Rand Find more jobs Register your CV Post a job