Chronic pain tagged posts

Rats were exposed to room light and fitted with contact lenses, one shown here, that allowed the green spectrum wavelength to pass through the lenses. (Photo: Bob Demers/UANews)

Chronic pain afflicts over 100 million people across the US. But now researchers at the University of Arizona have found promise in a novel, non-pharmacological approach to managing chronic pain – treating it with green light-emitting diodes (LED). In the study, rats with neuropathic pain that were bathed in green LED showed more tolerance for thermal and tactile stimulus than rats that were not bathed in green LED. In both cases no side effects from the therapy were observed, nor was motor or visual performance impaired. The beneficial effects lasted for 4 days after the rats’ last exposure to the green LED...

View of synapses in the amygdala of a mouse, obtained using a confocal microscope. mGlu4 receptors in red, and mGlu1a receptors in green. The white bar bottom right corresponds to 5 ?m. Credit: Zussy et al., 2016

Pain serves as a valuable warning signal, but when it becomes chronic, pain should be considered as a real disease. An international team including research scientists from the CNRS and INSERM has identified and controlled one of the centers associated with chronic pain. This work, published on 20 December 2016 in Molecular Psychiatry, made it possible to relieve the symptoms in mice and demonstrated the ability of the brain to remedy this problem.

While around 20% of the European population has experienced episodes of chronic pain, treatments are only effective in fewer than half...

Andrea Hohmann. Credit: Indiana University

Indiana University neuroscientist Andrea Hohmann has found evidence that the brain’s cannabis receptors may be used to treat chronic pain without the side effects associated with opioid-based pain relievers or medical marijuana. “The most exciting aspect of this research is the potential to produce the same therapeutic benefits as opioid-based pain relievers without side effects like addiction risk or increased tolerance over time,” said Hohmann, a Linda and Jack Gill Chair of Neuroscience and professor in the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.

Chronic pain is estimated to affect nearly 50 million adults in the US...

The yellow and red sections of this brain image shows the unique brain region — the mid frontal gyrus — which Northwestern scientists discovered is responsible for placebo response in pain relief. Credit: Marwan Baliki

Scientists have identified for the first time the region in the brain responsible for the “placebo effect” in pain relief, when a fake treatment actually results in substantial reduction of pain, according to new research from Northwestern Medicine and the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC).

Pinpointing the sweet spot of the pain killing placebo effect could result in the design of more personalized medicine for the 100 million Americans with chronic pain...