Smoking is a pain in the back
Smokers with new back pain less likely to recover, likely to develop chronic pain
2014-11-03
(Press-News.org) CHICAGO --- If you want to avoid chronic back pain, put out the cigarette. A new Northwestern Medicine® study has found that smokers are three times more likely than nonsmokers to develop chronic back pain, and dropping the habit may cut your chances of developing this often debilitating condition.
"Smoking affects the brain," said Bogdan Petre, lead author of the study and a technical scientist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. "We found that it affects the way the brain responds to back pain and seems to make individuals less resilient to an episode of pain."
This is the first evidence to link smoking and chronic pain with the part of the brain associated with addiction and reward. The study was published online in the journal Human Brain Mapping.
The results come from a longitudinal observational study of 160 adults with new cases of back pain. At five different times throughout the course of a year they were given MRI brain scans and were asked to rate the intensity of their back pain and fill out a questionnaire which asked about smoking status and other health issues. Thirty-five healthy control participants and 32 participants with chronic back pain were similarly monitored.
Scientists analyzed MRI activity between two brain areas (nucleus accumbens and medial prefrontal cortex, NAc-mPFC), which are involved in addictive behavior, and motivated learning. This circuitry is critical in development of chronic pain, the scientists found.
These two regions of the brain "talk" to one another and scientists discovered that the strength of that connection helps determine who will become a chronic pain patient. By showing how a part of the brain involved in motivated learning allows tobacco addiction to interface with pain chronification, the findings hint at a potentially more general link between addiction and pain.
"That circuit was very strong and active in the brain's of smokers," Petre said. "But we saw a dramatic drop in this circuit's activity in smokers who -- of their own will -- quit smoking during the study, so when they stopped smoking, their vulnerably to chronic pain also decreased."
Medication, such as anti-inflammatory drugs, did help study participants manage pain, but it didn't change the activity of the brain circuitry. In the future, behavioral interventions, such as smoking cessation programs, could be used to manipulate brain mechanisms as an effective strategy for chronic pain prevention and relief.
INFORMATION:
The National Institutes of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (grant number NS035115) funded this study.
Other authors of the paper are senior author Apkar Vania Apkarian, Souraya Torbey, James W. Griffith, Gildasio De Oliveira, Kristine Herrmann, Ali Mansour, Alex T. Baria, Marwan N. Baliki and Thomas J. Schnitzer of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2014-11-03
For the first time, researchers have shown that practising mindfulness meditation or being involved in a support group has a positive physical impact at the cellular level in breast cancer survivors.
A group working out of Alberta Health Services' Tom Baker Cancer Centre and the University of Calgary Department of Oncology has demonstrated that telomeres – protein complexes at the end of chromosomes – maintain their length in breast cancer survivors who practise meditation or are involved in support groups, while they shorten in a comparison group without ...
2014-11-03
Introducing competing "biosimilar" versions of complex biologic drugs used to treat illnesses such as cancer and rheumatoid arthritis could cut spending on biologics in the United States by $44 billion over the next decade, according to new analysis from the RAND Corporation.
While biologics have advanced medical treatment for many conditions, they often are expensive and patient copays for some biologics can be several thousand dollars per year. In 2011, eight of the top 20 drugs in the United States in terms of sales were biologics and the annual spending on the drugs ...
2014-11-03
BOSTON—New research reports that preoperative pain and depressive symptoms in older adults place them at greater risk of delirium following surgery. According to the findings published today in The Lancet Psychiatry journal, both pain and depression are independent and interactive risk factors for delirium, suggesting a cumulative effect.
Individuals with delirium experience a sharp decline in attention and mental function. Older adults are especially susceptible to delirium following surgery, occurring in up to 51% of surgical patients 65 and older. Moreover, depression ...
2014-11-03
Clemson researchers find that blending movement and computer programming supports girls in building computational thinking skills, according to an ongoing study funded by the National Science Foundation and emerging technology report published in journal Technology, Learning and Knowledge.
Even with increasing demands for computationally savvy workers, there is a lack of representation among women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields (STEM), the researchers say.
"We want more diverse faces around the table, helping to come up with technological ...
2014-11-03
Aging is the most significant and universal risk factor for developing neurodegenerative diseases, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases. This risk increases disproportionately with age, but no one really knows why.
Now a team of scientists from Northwestern University, Proteostasis Therapeutics, Inc. and Harvard University has uncovered some clues. The researchers are the first to find that the quality of protective genes called molecular chaperones declines dramatically in the brains of older humans, both ...
2014-11-03
Roughly one-third of the 700,000 United States troops who fought in the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf War have subsequently developed a distinct set of chronic health problems, dubbed Gulf War illness. Their symptoms, from fatigue, muscle pain and weakness to decreased cognitive function and gastrointestinal and skin problems, persist decades after the conflict.
In a study published in the Nov. 1 issue of Neural Computation, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine report that a high quality brand of coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10) – a compound ...
2014-11-03
NOAA's GOES-West satellite captured an image of Hurricane Vance and a much smaller developing low pressure area in the Eastern Pacific Ocean on Nov. 3. Vance's tropical-storm force winds extended to about 250 miles in diameter.
NOAA's GOES-West satellite captured an infrared image of the Eastern Pacific that showed Hurricane Vance was a couple of times larger than the developing low pressure area known as System 94E to the southeast of the hurricane. In the GOES image, taken Nov. 3 at 1200 UTC (7 a.m. EST/4 a.m. PST) clouds and showers extending from Vance's northern ...
2014-11-03
Women are significantly underrepresented in many science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields, and attempts to understand why have only resulted in disagreement among researchers, the lay public, and policymakers. In a comprehensive new report, an interdisciplinary team of psychological scientists and economists aims to cut through the confusion, synthesizing available research and providing a host of new analyses to identify the factors that drive women's underrepresentation in STEM. Their analyses show that, despite many differences between the sexes prior ...
2014-11-03
New York | Heidelberg, 3 November 2014 -- A new theoretical work establishes a long-sought-after connection between nuclear particles and electromagnetic theories. Its findings suggest that there is an equivalence between generalised Casimir forces and those that are referred to as weak nuclear interactions between protons and neutrons. The Casimir forces are due to the quantisation of electromagnetic fluctuations in vacuum, while the weak nuclear interactions are mediated by subatomic scale particles, originally called mesons by Yukawa. These findings by Barry Ninham ...
2014-11-03
This news release is available in French. A team of researchers from Inserm led by Paul Hofman (Inserm Unit 1081/University of Nice) has just made a significant advance in the area of early diagnosis of invasive cancers. In a study which has just been published in the journal PLOS ONE, the team shows that it is possible to detect, in patients at risk of developing lung cancer, early signs, in the form of circulating cancer cells, several months, and in some cases several years, before the cancer becomes detectable by CT scanning. This warning could play a key role in ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Smoking is a pain in the back
Smokers with new back pain less likely to recover, likely to develop chronic pain
