Two people fall and suffer seemingly similar injuries. Six months later, one has completely recovered but the other still has debilitating pain. How can different people seem to experience pain so differently? Through carefully controlled experiments using advanced brain imaging techniques, researchers are discovering that people’s brains can process the same pain signals from their bodies very differently. These insights are leading to surprising new strategies for controlling pain.
Advances in pain research were the focus of the first annual symposium of the NIH Pain Consortium. NIH created the consortium to enhance pain research and promote collaboration among pain researchers across the many NIH institutes and centers involved with pain research. Scientists at the inaugural symposium described their investigations into the genes involved in pain, how nerves transmit pain signals from the body to the brain, and new medications and other therapies under development.
Dr. Robert Coghill of Wake Forest University explained that there are significant differences in the way people experience pain. When people had the same level of heat applied to the backs of their legs, Coghill recounted, the intensity of pain they reported was “all over the place”—from someone who said it didn’t hurt at all to someone who said the pain was so intense they almost withdrew from the study.
Coghill’s team wanted to see whether these ratings represent a true difference in the way people experience pain or differences in how they explain what they feel. To answer this, they examined the brain activity of their subjects using an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) machine while they applied different levels of heat. They found that those who reported feeling more pain had stronger and more frequent activation in a number of brain areas, particularly a region called the primary somatosensory cortex.
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