PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Why chronic pain is all in your head

First study to show early brain changes predict which patients develop chronic pain

2012-07-02
(Press-News.org) CHICAGO --- When people have similar injuries, why do some end up with chronic pain while others recover and are pain free? The first longitudinal brain imaging study to track participants with a new back injury has found the chronic pain is all in their heads –- quite literally.

A new Northwestern Medicine study shows for the first time that chronic pain develops the more two sections of the brain --- related to emotional and motivational behavior --- talk to each other. The more they communicate, the greater the chance a patient will develop chronic pain.

The finding provides a new direction for developing therapies to treat intractable pain, which affects 30 to 40 million adults in the United States.

Researchers were able to predict, with 85 percent accuracy at the beginning of the study, which participants would go on to develop chronic pain based on the level of interaction between the frontal cortex and the nucleus accumbens.

The study is published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

"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," said A. Vania Apakarian, senior author of the paper and professor of physiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

"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."

The more emotionally the brain reacts to the initial injury, the more likely the pain will persist after the injury has healed. "It may be that these sections of the brain are more excited to begin with in certain individuals, or there may be genetic and environmental influences that predispose these brain regions to interact at an excitable level," Apkarian said.

The nucleus accumbens is an important center for teaching the rest of the brain how to evaluate and react to the outside world, Apkarian noted, and this brain region may use the pain signal to teach the rest of the brain to develop chronic pain.

"Now we hope to develop new therapies for treatment based on this finding," Apkarian added.

Chronic pain participants in the study also lost gray matter density, which is likely linked to fewer synaptic connections or neuronal and glial shrinkage, Apkarian said. Brain synapses are essential for communication between neurons.

"Chronic pain is one of the most expensive health care conditions in the U. S. yet there still is not a scientifically validated therapy for this condition," Apkarian said. Chronic pain costs an estimated $600 billion a year, according to a 2011 National Academy of Sciences report. Back pain is the most prevalent chronic pain condition.

A total of 40 participants who had an episode of back pain that lasted four to 16 weeks --- but with no prior history of back pain --- were studied. All subjects were diagnosed with back pain by a clinician. Brain scans were conducted on each participant at study entry and for three more visits during one year.

INFORMATION:

Other Northwestern authors on the paper include lead author Marwan N. Baliki, Bogdan Petre, Souraya Torbey, Kristina M. Herrmann, Lejian Huang and Thomas J. Schnitzer.

The study was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health grant NS35115.

END



ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Scripps Research Institute Scientists Develop Alternative to Gene Therapy

2012-07-02
LA JOLLA, CA – July 1, 2012 – Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute have discovered a surprisingly simple and safe method to disrupt specific genes within cells. The scientists highlighted the medical potential of the new technique by demonstrating its use as a safer alternative to an experimental gene therapy against HIV infection. "We showed that we can modify the genomes of cells without the troubles that have long been linked to traditional gene therapy techniques," said the study's senior author Carlos F. Barbas III, who is the Janet and Keith Kellogg II Professor ...

Pitt researchers propose new spin on old method to develop more efficient electronics

2012-07-02
PITTSBURGH—With the advent of semiconductor transistors—invented in 1947 as a replacement for bulky and inefficient vacuum tubes—has come the consistent demand for faster, more energy-efficient technologies. To fill this need, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh are proposing a new spin on an old method: a switch from the use of silicon electronics back to vacuums as a medium for electron transport—exhibiting a significant paradigm shift in electronics. Their findings were published online in Nature Nanotechnology July 1. For the past 40 years, the number of transistors ...

Chronic inflammation in the brain leads the way to Alzheimer's disease

2012-07-02
Research published today in Biomed Central's open access journal Journal of Neuroinflammation suggests that chronic inflammation can predispose the brain to develop Alzheimer's disease. To date it has been difficult to pin down the role of inflammation in Alzheimer's disease (AD), especially because trials of NSAIDs appeared to have conflicting results. Although the ADAPT (The Alzheimer`s Disease Anti-inflammatory Prevention Trial) trial was stopped early, recent results suggest that NSAIDs can help people with early stages of AD but that prolonged treatment is necessary ...

Ants farm root aphid clones in subterranean rooms

2012-07-02
The yellow meadow ant, Lasius flavus, farms root aphids for sugar (honeydew) and nitrogen (protein). In turn these species of aphids have developed distinctive traits never found in free living species such as the 'trophobiotic organ' to hold honey dew for the ants. New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology shows that over half of ant mounds contained only one of the three most common species of aphid, and two thirds of these has a single aphid clone. Even in mounds which contained more than one species of aphid 95% of the ...

Penn researchers improve living tissues with 3-D printed vascular networks made from sugar

2012-07-02
PHILADELPHIA — Researchers are hopeful that new advances in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine could one day make a replacement liver from a patient's own cells, or animal muscle tissue that could be cut into steaks without ever being inside a cow. Bioengineers can already make 2D structures out of many kinds of tissue, but one of the major roadblocks to making the jump to 3D is keeping the cells within large structures from suffocating; organs have complicated 3D blood vessel networks that are still impossible to recreate in the laboratory. Now, University ...

Potential treatment target identified in an animal model of pancreatic cancer

2012-07-02
Detailed analysis of genes expressed in circulating tumor cells (CTCs) -- cells that break off from solid tumors and travel through the bloodstream -- has identified a potential treatment target in metastatic pancreatic cancer. In a report that will appear in Nature and has received advance online publication, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Cancer Center investigators describe finding increased expression of WNT2, a member of a known family of oncogenes, in CTCs from a mouse model of the deadly tumor and from human patients. The researchers were able to capture ...

La Jolla Institute scientist discovers key step in immune system-fueled inflammation

2012-07-02
VIDEO: Klaus Ley, M.D., a scientist at the La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology, has discovered a key step in the journey of inflammation-producing immune cells (shown here), which are... Click here for more information. SAN DIEGO – (July 1, 2012) – Like detectives seeking footprints and other clues on a television "whodunit," science can also benefit from analyzing the tracks of important players in the body's molecular landscape. Klaus Ley, M.D., a scientist at ...

Coffee consumption inversely associated with risk of most common form of skin cancer

2012-07-02
PHILADELPHIA — Increasing the number of cups of caffeinated coffee you drink could lower your risk of developing the most common form of skin cancer, basal cell carcinoma, according to a study published in Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. "Our data indicate that the more caffeinated coffee you consume, the lower your risk of developing basal cell carcinoma," said Jiali Han, Ph.D., associate professor at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School in Boston and Harvard School of Public Health. "I would not recommend ...

Rheumatoid arthritis takes high toll in unemployment, early death, Mayo Clinic finds

2012-07-02
ROCHESTER, Minn. -- In the realm of deadly and disabling diseases, conditions such as cancer and Alzheimer's seem to attract the most media attention. But there are others that take a similarly high toll, and rheumatoid arthritis is one of them, Mayo Clinic researchers say. It is a common cause of disability: 1 of every 5 rheumatoid arthritis patients is unable to work two years after diagnosis, and within five years, that rises to one-third. Life expectancy drops by up to five years, they write in the July issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings in an article taking stock of ...

Single protein promotes resistance to widely used anti-estrogen drugs

2012-07-02
WASHINGTON -- Researchers at Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center have uncovered a single molecule they say is a major determinant of resistance to anti-estrogen therapy used to treat or prevent breast cancer in high-risk women. In the July 1 issue of Cancer Research, the scientists say glucose-regulated protein 78 (GRP78), activated as breast cells undergo stress induced by the agents tamoxifen and fulvestrant, turns off apoptosis, a cell death response, and turns on autophagy. In autophagy, the cell "eats" and digests components within the cell body that ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

New study reveals how reduced rainfall threatens plant diversity

New study reveals optimized in vitro fertilization techniques to boost coral restoration efforts in the Caribbean

No evidence that maternal sickness during pregnancy causes autism

Healthy gut bacteria that feed on sugar analyzed for the first time

240-year-old drug could save UK National Health Service £100 million a year treating common heart rhythm disorder

Detections of poliovirus in sewage samples require enhanced routine and catch-up vaccination and increased surveillance, according to ECDC report

Scientists unlock ice-repelling secrets of polar bear fur for sustainable anti-freezing solutions 

Ear muscle we thought humans didn’t use — except for wiggling our ears — actually activates when people listen hard

COVID-19 pandemic drove significant rise in patients choosing to leave ERs before medically recommended

Burn grasslands to maintain them: What is good for biodiversity?

Ventilation in hospitals could cause viruses to spread further

New study finds high concentrations of plastics in the placentae of infants born prematurely

New robotic surgical systems revolutionizing patient care

New MSK research a step toward off-the-shelf CAR T cell therapy for cancer

UTEP professor wins prestigious research award from American Psychological Association

New national study finds homicide and suicide is the #1 cause of maternal death in the U.S.

Women’s pelvic tissue tears during childbirth unstudied, until now

Earth scientists study Sikkim flood in India to help others prepare for similar disasters

Leveraging data to improve health equity and care

Why you shouldn’t scratch an itchy rash: New study explains

Linking citation and retraction data aids in responsible research evaluation

Antibody treatment prevents severe bird flu in monkeys

Polar bear energetic model reveals drivers of polar bear population decline

Socioeconomic and political stability bolstered wild tiger recovery in India

Scratching an itch promotes antibacterial inflammation

Drivers, causes and impacts of the 2023 Sikkim flood in India

Most engineered human cells created for studying disease

Polar bear population decline the direct result of extended ‘energy deficit’ due to lack of food

Lifecycle Journal launches: A new vision for scholarly publishing

Ancient DNA analyses bring to life the 11,000-year intertwined genomic history of sheep and humans

[Press-News.org] Why chronic pain is all in your head
First study to show early brain changes predict which patients develop chronic pain