This Week’s Q&A
Monday, August 4th, 2008
Q: Since my spinal cord injury, I have been living with chronic pain and my doctors have been unable to figure out what’s causing it. Why is it so hard to pinpoint?
A: Chronic pain is often difficult to find one specific cause for due to a combination of factors. First, patients who suffer from chronic pain, no matter what the initial injury was, often also experience anxiety and depression. These two strong emotions not only interfere with a proper diagnosis, but contribute to the pain.
One theory is that an injury causes increased nervous activity that transmits pain from the spinal cord to the brain, damaging the nerve circuits it passes through. These circuits amplify the pain beyond what the physical injury would seem to suggest.
The idea being considered by researchers is that these “pain amplifying circuits” have become self-sustaining. If this is the case, the next step is to figure out if they can be turned off or at least dialed down. We don’t have the answers yet, but at least there is some comfort in the knowledge that scientists are working on a solution.
