Researchers Explore How the Brain Processes Pain

Advancements made in the search to objectively measure patient pain

Chronic pain is a reality for more than 100 million Americans, including many cancer patients. Scientists continue to search for a method to objectively measure pain, and progress is achieved with this recent study.

Marco Loggia, PhD, the lead author of the study and a researcher in the Pain Management Center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Department of Radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital said, “While we need to be cautious in the interpretation of our results, this has the potential to be an exciting discovery for anyone who suffers from chronic pain.”

The study, published in January 2013 print edition of the journal Pain, involved 16 adults with chronic back pain and 16 adults without pain. Researchers used arterial spin labeling, a brain imaging technique, to examine patterns of brain connectivity. Study results showed that when a patient’s pain increased, a network of brain regions called Default Mode Network displayed changes in its connections. Regional connections within the network deteriorated, while at the same time regions outside the network connected with this network. Because similar observations have been documented in previous studies of fibromyalgia patients, these variations in brain connectivity might reflect a general feature of chronic pain. Therefore, the brain processes may be common among different patient populations.

“We showed that specific brain patterns appear to track the severity of pain reported by patients, and can predict who is more likely to experience a worsening of chronic back pain while performing maneuvers designed to induce pain. If further research shows this metric is reliable, this is a step toward developing an objective scale for measuring pain in humans,” said Loggia.

Source: Brigham and Women’s Hospital.