Repeated exposure to psychological trauma, or deep anxiety or depression — especially in childhood — can leave a physical imprint on the brain that can make some people more vulnerable to chronic pain, scientists say.&nb...
This section will include pain research in the news, general stories about research and findings, pain abstracts in the news, and PubMed abstracts
Scientists at The University of Manchester, United Kingdom, are developing a smart phone application connected to goggles that flash light at a special frequency to tune patients' brains in a ground-breaking treatment fo...
Researchers at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia, have developed a collaborative robot system to automatically treat back, neck, and head pain caused by soft tissue injury. Full story.
Five fundamental treatment goals of a pain psychologist are reviewed in the Psychology Today blog post. Full story.
Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), a non-invasive brain stimulation technique, may be a viable therapy for women with endometriosis experiencing chronic pelvic pain for whom other treatments have failed...
Individuals with versus without cluster headache were found to have lower cranial and extracranial pressure pain thresholds, indicating central sensitization, according to a study published in Pain Medicine . Full story....
In a study published in Science , a team assessed the responses of eight kinds of mole-rats and two other rodent species to three substances that normally elicit pain: acid, capsaicin, and allyl isothiocyanate (AITC), th...
Integrative medicine services — primarily massage therapy — resulted in a significant reduction in pain among hospitalized patients, according to recent research at two Mayo Clinic hospitals. Full story.
Patients who decreased opioid use after undergoing basivertebral nerve (BVN) ablation were found to experience greater relief of chronic low back pain than those who increased opioid use, according to a study published i...
Abstract: Negative affect (NA) is a significant cause of disability for chronic pain patients. While little is known about the mechanism underlying pain-comorbid NA, previous studies have implicated neuroinflammation in the pathophysiology of both depression and chronic pain. Here, we tested the hypothesis that NA in pain patients is linked to elevations in the brain levels of the glial marker 18 kDa translocator protein (TSPO), and changes in functional connectivity. 25 cLBP patients (42.4 ± 13 years old; 13F, 12M) with chronic low back pain (cLBP) and 27 healthy control subjects (48.9 ± 13 years old; 14F, 13M) received an integrated (i.e., simultaneous) positron emission tomography (PET)/magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scan with the second-generation TSPO ligand [11C]PBR28.