Removing Back Pain Heals the Brain Too

According to the conclusions of a new study, it would appear that eliminating chronic back pain has a number of health benefits, in addition to making it easier for people to put up with their condition. Experts say that the brain itself displays less abnormalities as pain is removed.

Being constantly subjected to pain can be really damaging for the human brain, experts say, and this is why removing this pain may in fact lead to a host of positive effects, such as cerebral recovery.

In a new set of experiments, participants whose back pains had been eliminated were assessed six months later. It was determined that their brains displayed significantly fewer signs of abnormalities than those of their peers who still experienced chronic pain.

The study, conducted by a team at the McGill University in Montreal, Canada, was focused on people who reported experiencing chronic back pains for at least a year. Team leader and MGU neuroscientist Laura Stone, together with colleagues, used brain-imaging techniques to look at subjects' brains.

Using an investigations technique called Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), researchers determined that those suffering from chronic pain displayed a thinning in a portion of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, Science News reports.

Previous studies have already linked this brain region to pain modulation, so the correlation makes sense, the team says. Abnormal levels of activity were recorded in these areas as participants were subjected to simple cognitive tests.

A segment of the test group was then treated using either injections or pain-relieving surgery, whereas the other participants were not. Six months later, the subjects were again put inside a brain scanner.

In those whose levels of pain had decreased, experts found a thickening of the dorsolateral prefrontal regions, and also a regularization of the abnormal activity patterns previously recorded in those areas.

“We know that pain causes brain changes, and now we know that taking pain away reverses those changes,” explains Stone in a new paper detailing the findings. The work is published in the May 18 issue of the esteemed Journal of Neuroscience.

The conclusions of this study are “a concrete message that certainly brings hope and relief to those suffering from this condition,” comments Dante Chialvo, who is a neuroscientist at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA).