Chronic pain tagged posts

A newly confirmed link with insulin resistance may radically change the way fibromyalgia and related forms of chronic pain are identified and managed. Researchers led by a team from The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston were able to dramatically reduce the pain of fibromyalgia patients with medication that targeted insulin resistance.

This discovery could dramatically alter the way that chronic pain can be identified and managed. Dr. Miguel Pappolla, UTMB professor of neurology, said that although the discovery is very preliminary, it may lead to a revolutionary shift on how fibromyalgia and related forms of chronic pain are treated...

Effects of electrical stimulation of cingulum bundle. Neuroscientists at Emory University School of Medicine have discovered a focal pathway in the brain that when electrically stimulated causes immediate laughter, followed by a sense of calm and happiness, even during awake brain surgery. The effects of stimulation were observed in an epilepsy patient undergoing diagnostic monitoring for seizure diagnosis. These effects were then harnessed to help her complete a separate awake brain surgery two days later.

The behavioral effects of direct electrical stimulation of the cingulum bundle, a white matte...

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...