Last week I picked up a copy of Metro and came across an article entitled “Back pain ‘cured with a £114 dose of antibiotics’”. The story has also been covered by theguardian, The Times and the NHS. It’s based on the results of 2 studies published in the European Spine Journal by Hanne B Albert…
A recent study by Dr. Pierre Rainville and Étienne Vachon-Presseau from the University of Montreal has shed some light on the relationships between stress, the brain and pain. Their study compared 16 patients with chronic back pain with a control group of 18 healthy subjects. They found that back pain patients had higher levels of cortisol than…
The team of researchers led by Prof. Laura Stone at McGill University recently found that 6 months after inflicting nerve injuries on mice, the mice still displayed signs of skin hypersensitivity and motor impairment. This was associated with epigenetic changes in the amygdala and prefrontal cortex of the brain. Epigenetics explains how genes can be switched…
A recent study by Rubinstein et al. published in The Clinical Journal of Pain has shown that long-term use of opioid painkillers by men is associated with lower levels of testosterone. This effect is much more prevalent when using long-acting opioids. Low testosterone or hypogonadism, as it’s also known, has been linked with decreases in…
Although mainly about the effects of emotion on reason, ‘Descartes’ Error‘ by Antonio Damasio contains a few fascinating nuggets on pain. He distinguishes 2 components to pain: Sensory perception from skin, mucosa, muscle, organ, etc. – the nerve endings stimulated in an area of the body lead to a ‘pain image’, a temporary representation of body…
Professor Apkarian has studied chronic pain for over 20 years. In a recent study looking into people with recent back pain, he was able to predict with 85% accuracy those that would go on to develop chronic back pain! How? By noticing an increased level of cross-talk between two specific parts of the brain…suggesting that…
Last year BBC Horizon created a documentary entitled ‘The Secret World of Pain‘. I watched it on YouTube a week ago, thought it was really well put together and so decided to share the most salient points. Pain is one of our most ancient survival mechanisms and it protects and alerts us to danger. The…