- MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS PAIN
- APRIL 13, 2013
- BY: LORI FRIEND
As the impulses are conducted through the electrode array, the thalamus interprets them as auditory information. And that’s just the beginning of registering pain.
Credits:
http://dev.nsta.org/evwebs/1719h/details/thalamus.ht
Multiple sclerosis (MS) pain is a pain most patients have a hard time describing. It can be described as a burning sensation, pins and needles or even like a toothache and it can be incredibly frustrating for both the sufferer and the doctor.
Mr. Yasime of Lima understands this all too well. “Years ago, about the time I was diagnosed, there was so little we could do about my MS Hug. The pain was intense and it scared me to death, I thought I was having a freaking heart attack,” he remembers.
Continuing, he says, “We tried Elavil and then gabapentin, which I stayed with since it seemed to work so much better for me and, although I have been doing pretty good with it all these years, I can always tell when I forget to take it after a couple days.”
A team of researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder was able to look at a person’s brain and predict how much painthat person was feeling, resulting in what could create the first objective test for pain.
No more trying to explain on a one to ten scale about that stabbing, inexplicable, near debilitating pain that is felt for no apparent reason.
The lead author, and associate professor of psychology and neuroscience, Tor Wager stated, “Right now, there’s no clinically acceptable way to measure pain and other emotions other than to ask a person how they feel,” and went on to explain how they used “painful heat” to measure responses.
114 subjects were exposed to different levels of heat, from a benign warm to the painfully hot. The researchers then used computer data-mining techniques to see the pattern of a “distinct neurologic signature for the pain.”
They had found that the “signature” was transferable across different people; meaning pain levels weren’t based on past images, and this incredible find permitted a 90 to 100% accuracy rate.
Their paper also tells of another surprising find: signatures were not specific to whatever kind of pain a person felt. The signature for physical pain was absent in those who had recently gone through a painful break-up, for instance.
Wager is excited about the findings and continuing on with it, “I think there are many ways to extend this study, and we’re looking to test the patterns that we’ve developed for predicting pain across different conditions. Is the predictive signature different if you experience pressure pain or mechanical pain, or pain on different parts of the body?”
Although chronic pain wasn’t quantified during the study, the researchers do believe this study will be able to be of help to this in the future.
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