Chronic pain influences the way brain works by Zuzana Zelenakova

Chronic pain is defined as the pain that lasts six months and more after the particular injury. But patients suffering from chronic pain must often deal also with other symptoms or conditions, including depression, anxiety, trouble with sleeping or even problems with making simple decisions. US scientists from Northwestern University in Chicago announced on Tuesday that they found the reasons why it is so. In a healthy brain particular regions of brain are in state of equilibrium, which means that if one part is active the others are not. But the brain of patients with chronic pain shows a constant activity in the front part of the cerebral cortex, mostly associated with emotions. "The areas that are affected fail to deactivate when they should," said Dante Chialvo, a researcher at Northwestern University. To find out more about this activity, Chialvo and his colleagues performed so called functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan brains of two groups of people. The first group was suffering from chronic back pain and the second one consisted of healthy people. The volunteers were given a simple task to track a moving bar on a computer screen. People with back pain did well, but "at the expense of using their brain differently than the pain-free group," said Chialvo. "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." The research also suggests that it is necessary to find ways how to treat these people and prevent the other symptoms connected with their condition and not only control their pain.

related story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080205/hl_nm/brain_pain_dc;_ylt=Aupm7Gi2FaU132wF7Jkpt5us0NUE

by Zuzana Zelenakova for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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Edited by: Katarina Bosanska