I ran into another interesting article on chronic pain today. Some researchers at Northwestern University used functional MRI scanning to show that brains of those with chronic back pain are stuck in a sort of full-throttle mode of operation, even for simple tasks.Here's the wire story:
By Julie Steenhuysen Tue Feb 5, 5:50 PM ET
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Brain scans of people in chronic pain show a state of constant activity in areas that should be at rest, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday, a finding that could help explain why pain patients have higher rates of depression, anxiety and other disorders.
They said chronic pain seems to alter the way people process information that is unrelated to pain.
"It seems that enduring pain for a long time affects brain function in response to even minimally demanding attention tasks completely unrelated to pain," the researchers wrote in the Journal of Neuroscience.
Continue reading on Yahoo News or, if you want to read the actual research paper, there is a PDF here:
Beyond Feeling: Chronic Pain Hurts the Brain, Disrupting
the Default-Mode Network Dynamics
Marwan N. Baliki,1 Paul Y. Geha,1 A. Vania Apkarian,1,2,3,4 and Dante R. Chialvo1
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