Did you know that the leading cause of disability worldwide is chronic pain? Millions and millions of people live their daily lives marked by pain. Not only does it cause a lot of physical suffering, it puts a lot of stress on people’s mental health.
A new University of Queensland-led research revealed a link between the differences in brain structure and chronic pain.
Back and neck pain are very common types of chronic pain, but some people suffer from more widespread conditions. Image credit: Injurymap via Wikimedia (CC BY 4.0)
Chronic pain is way more common than you think. In the developed world something around one in five adult people are affected by chronic pain. Of course, it is a huge load of suffering on our populations. People cannot work or have a normal lifestyle that they would like to live. Furthermore, it is a huge financial burden on our healthcare systems. Diagnosis of chronic pain needs to be improved and we need to understand the causes of it much better to be able to bring any kind of relief any time soon.
Scientists now studied genetic data from nearly 200,000 people with various chronic pain conditions and data of 34,000 people who had undergone scans measuring the size of different brain regions. Of course, chronic pain is not always the same – some people were suffering from neck, shoulder, back, hip, knee, abdominal pain, while others had widespread pain in different locations in the body. This study showed that differences in brain structure and genetics can be linked to chronic pain. And those results were actually quite surprising to some degree.
Dr Scott Farrell, one of the authors of the study, explained: “A decrease in size of certain brain regions was thought to be a consequence of chronic pain, however we found that reduced thickness in one particular area, the insular cortex, may contribute to a higher risk of chronic abdominal pain,” he said. This result was quite unexpected because prior clinical studies suggested changes in brain structure occur after the onset of chronic pain.”
This study built on several other large genetic studies and included a load of statistical genetic methods to large-scale pain and brain imaging data. But scientists are already looking at the work ahead. They want to begin further analyses to determine the genetic causal relationships between chronic pain and the brain structure. They want to eliminate the effects of lifestyle and other factors to highlight the most likely mechanisms of chronic pain that could be addressed in new treatments.
A lot of people you know are dealing with daily chronic pain in neck, shoulder, back, hip, knee, abdominal and other regions. Widespread chronic pain is common as well. Scientists are trying to find the most effective treatments, but for now chronic pain remains the most common cause of disability in the world.
Source: University of Queensland