Chronic pain is any pain that persists. Common chronic pains are lower back pains and headaches. In this study, it was noted that anxiety, troubled memory, and depression often are present in people with chronic pains. Brain scans were used on such patients and they noticed that they all had a smaller hippocampus as opposed to a healthy person. Having a small hippocampus is a likely cause as to why those people were having memory and anxiety problems since the hippocampus controls learning, memory, and emotional processing. Also, when they were experimenting on mice they found that they weren't making any new neurons. The hippocampus is one of the structures within the brain where new neurons can form.
I found this article to be really interesting since I personally have chronic pains, and a lot of people will come across having a chronic pain or two in their lives. So I wonder how this will affect me now, and even further into my future.
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This is very interesting and I would be interested to see more research done on this topic. It makes sense to me that people with chronic pain (especially prolonged) would have problems with anxiety, depression, and troubled memory. Chronic pain can be an annoying and become a burden on many aspects of everyday life. This being said I can see that it may cause irritability as well as wear and tear on the nervous system. I wonder if such pain specifically triggers neuronal growth and functioning of the hippocampus and why this area? Is there an association between the places of pain and specific places of effect on the nervous system (body functioning in general)? This seems like a good basis of research with possibly much more to come, especially considering the wide spread conditions of anxiety and depression and the development of drugs and treatments for these conditions.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading this article, a few questions come to mind. The first being if this chronic back pain actually reduced the size of the hippocampus or if the people with chronic back pain already has a much smaller hippocampus than normal? Another question is why does this back pain reduce the size of the hippocampus? Since this pain is positively correlated with increasing depression and anxiety issues, which are both emotional processes, wouldn't there be an increase in the size of the hippocampus with the rise of these negative emotions? This would make sense in my opinion, however, these negative emotions could also be degrading the hippocampus as they do the body. When a person undergoes an immense amount of stress, anxiety, or depression, their body often withers with their mind. Therefore, these negative emotions could, biologically, cause the withering of the hippocampus as they do to the body itself.
ReplyDeleteAfter looking at this article, I completely agree with the author in terms of stating that the recurrence of chronic pain as well as the issues it causes should be viewed as a brain-based disorder. The evidence stated in this reading makes sense and seems to be well thought out and reasonably well tested. I would really like to see this taken further with more tests on many different types of people. I know from experience that there are a lot of people out there that suffer from constant chronic pain and there really isn't a full proof explanation on what causes it. I wonder if the people that were scanned and found to have a hippocampus that was reduced in size were impaired in other ways because of this. I feel like this would have some effect on their long term memory formation at least. Also, I think that there is a good market here for a drug or treatment that could help with constant chronic pain, more tests and studies could provide the foundations for this to happen.
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