Researchers have discovered brain signatures for people with chronic pain related to strokes or amputations involving phantom limb pain, the National Institutes of Health said recently.
The study’s results could lead to new treatments for pain, according to a May 22 release. This is the first time the researchers have recorded this type of data, stemming from a long-term goal to understand how pain is shown through brain activity. While patients were at home, data was gathered several months. The researchers used machine learning algorithms to analyze it and were able to find a part of the brain associated with chronic pain.
“This is a great example of how tools for measuring brain activity originating from the BRAIN Initiative have been applied to the significant public health problem of relieving persistent, severe chronic pain,” Walter Koroshetz, M.D., director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, part of NIH, said. "We are hopeful that building from these preliminary findings could lead to effective, non-addictive pain treatments.”
This is the beginning of working toward ways to track and treat the chronic pain. The results were published in Nature Neuroscience and funded by NIH’s Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, as well as the NIH Helping to End Addiction Long-Term (HEAL) Initiative.
The top priority is to find effective, non-addictive treatments for chronic pain due to the opioid epidemic.
One of the top reasons for disability around the world is chronic pain, the release said. Damage to the nerve system is a root cause for neuropathic pain. Injuries to the body’s nerves tend to be the most common cause of pain, but in this case the pain is believed to come from the brain itself. People who experience this know how horrible it can be because this pain doesn’t respond well to therapies.
“When you think about it, pain is one of the most fundamental experiences an organism can have,” Prasad Shirvalkar, associate professor of anesthesia and neurological surgery, said. “Despite this, there is still so much we don’t understand about how pain works. By developing better tools to study and potentially affect pain responses in the brain, we hope to provide options to people living with chronic pain conditions.”
