Chronic Pain Shrinks People's Brains

[betrayed]

Chronic Pain Shrinks People's Brains

By Robert Roy Britt

LiveScience Senior Writer

posted: 22 November, 2004

5:00 p.m. ET

Pain causes an unexpected brain drain, according to a new study in which the brains of people with chronic backaches were up to 11 percent smaller than those of non-sufferers.

People afflicted with other long-term pain and stress might face similar brain shrinkage, said study leader A. Vania Apkarian of Northwestern University.

The results suggest those with constant pain lose gray matter equal to an oversized pea for each year of pain. Gray matter is an outer layer of the brain rich in nerve cells and crucial to information and memory processing.

The results don't reveal why the brain shrinks, but it might involve degradation of neurons, which are the signal transmitters of the mind and body.

"It is possible it's just the stress of having to live with the condition," Apkarian told LiveScience. "The neurons become overactive or tired of the activity."

Another possibility is that people born with smaller numbers of neurons are predisposed to suffering chronic pain. But some of the differences measured "must be directly related to the condition," Apkarian said.

The research involved a one-time brain scan of 26 people who'd had unrelenting back pain for at least a year (and in one case for up to 35 years), along with a pain-free control group. Pain sufferers had lost 5 to 11 percent of gray matter over and above what normal aging would take away.

"People who have had pain for longer times have had more brain atrophy," Apkarian said.

No attempt was made to correlate brain size to brain function. It is possible that some of the shrinkage involves relatively noncrucial tissue -- other than neurons -- and that some of the effects are reversible if the pain is eliminated, Apkarian and colleagues write in the Nov. 23 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

Apkarian said other varieties of pain might cause a similar atrophy of gray matter, and he plans to study that possibility in future studies.

"Suffering of pain is fundamentally an emotional condition," Apkarian said. "Different types of pain will have different types of emotional parameters, which will probably result in different types of atrophy -- different amounts and in different brain regions."

[tdak]

well in the case of a shrinking brain due to pain, I guess mine will still take a while to go down to normal size, since it was my brain that herniated and caused the pain to begin with. On the other hand I try to do mind games to keep myself alert, like crosswords, trivia and things of that nature.

[Guest rickb54]

If this were true my brain would be smaller than a pea by now...... maybe it is

[john999]

Really, I think the best thing to do with chronic pain is to try and somehow stay busy so you can get your mind off it. I am trying to volunteer to do something. I can't work 40 hours a week but I want to do something. I think it is good because it gets your mind off your troubles for a few hours. There are roadblocks but they can be overcome.

[tdak]

That is what I do. I do some volunteering, but it wears me out very fast and I don't do much except sit and listen in on meeting and give my input. I also try to find little things to do, maybe crafts or something to that nature. I have constant pain in my head and the meds just seem to take the edge off, but thats it. If I do nothing then thats all I think about, so I try to stay as busy as I possibly can.