[tri-med] FYI - Brain Study Examines How People Feel Pain

      Brain Study Examines How People Feel Pain 
      June 24, 2003 
      WASHINGTON (AP) -- Pain that brings tears to one person's eyes may be 
barely noticed by someone else, and that can be a problem for doctors deciding 
on treatment. 
      The answer: Listen to the patient, a new study says. Some people really 
do feel more pain than others. 

      "We have all met people who seem very sensitive to pain as well as those 
who appear to tolerate pain very well," said Robert C. Coghill of Wake Forest 
University Baptist Medical Center. 

      "Until now, there was no objective evidence that could confirm that these 
individual differences in pain sensitivity are, in fact, real," said Coghill, 
lead investigator on the paper published Monday in the online edition of 
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

      The study of brain activity showed that some people respond more strongly 
to pain. 

      "One of the critical things is, it provides physicians with the evidence 
they need to have confidence in patients' reports of pain and use that to guide 
treatment," Coghill said. 

      The researchers used magnetic resonance imaging to study the brains of 17 
volunteers. The skin of each volunteer's lower right leg was heated with a 
heating pad. 

      After each heating the participants gave their estimate of how painful it 
was and the two sessions were averaged. On a one-to-10 scale various 
individuals rated the heating pain from a low of one to a high of "almost 
nine." 

      When the researchers compared the brain scans to the pain ratings of the 
volunteers they found that parts of the brain known to be involved in 
experiencing pain were more active in people who said they felt more pain. 

      In particular, they found increased activity in the primary somatosensory 
cortex, which deals with pain location and intensity, and the anterior 
cingulate cortex, which handles unpleasant feelings caused by pain. 

      But they found little difference between people in the activity of the 
thalamus, which helps transmit pain signals from the spinal cord to brain 
regions. 

      That may indicate that incoming pain signals are being delivered by the 
spinal cord in a similar way for different people, but once they arrive in the 
brain they are handled differently. 

      Coghill said the study found no difference in response to heat pain 
between men and women. 

      His paper comes six months after researchers at the University of 
Michigan reported finding a gene that can make people more or less sensitive to 
pain, depending on the form they inherit. 

      In that study, brain scans showed that painkilling chemicals called 
endorphins were much more active in the brains of people who reported less 
sensitivity to pain. 

      Copyright 2003 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
     

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