What injured squid can teach us about irritability and pain - LA Times
A new study involving injured squid and hungry sea bass may help explain why we are so grumpy and irritable when we are in pain.
For many of us, the unpleasantness of being in pain often goes beyond the agony of the injury. If we are in excruciating discomfort, suddenly it seems everything bothers us -- sounds are too loud, lights are too bright, and even a gentle touch can be uncomfortable.
"One of the effects of pain is the peripheral sensory system becomes hyperactive," said Edgar T. Walters, who studies pain and neural plasticity at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston. "People in pain ar...
Source: Psychology of Pain - May 9, 2014 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
Reading Pain in a Human Face - NYTimes.com
How well can computers interact with humans? Certainly computers play a mean game of chess, which requires strategy and logic, and "Jeopardy!," in which they must process language to understand the clues read by Alex Trebek (and buzz in with the correct question).But in recent years, scientists have striven for an even more complex goal: programming computers to read human facial expressions.We all know what it's like to experience pain that makes our faces twist into a grimace. But can you tell if someone else's face of pain is real or feigned?The practical applications could be profound...
Source: Psychology of Pain - April 29, 2014 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
Male Scent May Compromise Biomedical Research | Science/AAAS | News
Jeffrey Mogil's students suspected there was something fishy going on with their experiments. They were injecting an irritant into the feet of mice to test their pain response, but the rodents didn't seem to feel anything. "We thought there was something wrong with the injection," says Mogil, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. The real culprit was far more surprising: The mice that didn't feel pain had been handled by male students. Mogil's group discovered that this gender distinction alone was enough to throw off their whole experiment—and likely influences the work of other researcher...
Source: Psychology of Pain - April 29, 2014 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
The Limits of 'No Pain, No Gain' - NYTimes
Exercise makes us tired. A new study helps to elucidate why and also suggests that while it is possible to push through fatigue to reach new levels of physical performance, it is not necessarily wise.On the surface, exercise-related fatigue seems simple and easy to understand. We exert ourselves and, eventually, grow weary, with leaden, sore muscles, at which point most of us slow or stop exercising. Rarely, if ever, do we push on to the point of total physical collapse.But scientists have long been puzzled about just how muscles know that they're about to run out of steam and need to convey that message to the brain, whic...
Source: Psychology of Pain - April 24, 2014 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
Surge in Prescriptions for Opioid Painkillers for Pregnant Women - NYTimes.com
Doctors are prescribing opioid painkillers to pregnant women in astonishing numbers, new research shows, despite the fact that risks to the developing fetus are largely unknown.
Of 1.1 million pregnant women enrolled in Medicaid nationally, nearly 23 percent filled an opioid prescription in 2007, up from 18.5 percent in 2000, according to a study published last week in Obstetrics and Gynecology, the largest to date of opioid prescriptions among pregnant women. Medicaidcovers the medical expenses for 45 percent of births in the United States.
The lead author, Rishi J. Desai, a research fellow at Brigham and Women's Ho...
Source: Psychology of Pain - April 14, 2014 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
A Five-Dimensional View of Pain | Pain Research Forum
Leaders of a major effort to systematically classify all common chronic pain conditions expect to have the first stage completed by mid-July 2014. The Pain Taxonomy, a project of the ACTTION public-private partnership, and the American Pain Society is one of two independent initiatives launched last spring to fill a widely perceived need for an updated evidence-based approach to improve diagnosis, treatment, and research of chronic pain (seePRF related news story). Key issues and decisions of the initial consensus meeting held in May 2013 are summed up in the March 2014 issue of The Journal of Pain. The paper also des...
Source: Psychology of Pain - April 8, 2014 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
Pain Medicine News - Fibromyalgia Now Widely Recognized as Requiring Multimodal Approach
Israeli fibromyalgia guidelines published online in November 2013 and Canadian guidelines published in May 2013 follow in the solid footsteps of the 2010 American College of Rheumatology preliminary diagnostic criteria for fibromyalgia. The Canadian and Israeli documents eschew an extensive physical examination and a tender-point count, focus on the importance of nonpharmacologic treatments and recognize fibromyalgia as neither a distinct rheumatic nor mental disorder. German guidelines cut from similar cloth were published in 2008."All three guidelines focus on a multimodal approach; and we emphasize the primacy of physic...
Source: Psychology of Pain - March 13, 2014 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
FDA Approves First Device to Prevent Migraine
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today allowed marketing of the first device for the preventive treatment of migraine headaches (Cefaly, STX-Med).It is also the first transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) device specifically authorized for use before the onset of pain, the FDA noted in a statement released today."Cefaly provides an alternative to medication for migraine prevention," Christy Foreman, director of the Office of Device Evaluation at the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health, said in the statement. "This may help patients who cannot tolerate current migraine medications for prev...
Source: Psychology of Pain - March 12, 2014 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
Analgesic, Anesthetic, and Addiction Clinical Trial Translations, Innovations, Opportunities, and Networks (ACTTION)
The mission of the Analgesic, Anesthetic, and Addiction Clinical Trial Translations, Innovations, Opportunities, and Networks (ACTTION) public-private partnership with the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is to identify, prioritize, sponsor, coordinate, and promote innovative activities — with a special interest in optimizing clinical trials — that will expedite the discovery and development of improved analgesic, anesthetic, and addiction treatments for the benefit of the public health.
ACTTION is a multi-year, multi-phase initiative that is closely aligned with the FDA's Critical Path Initiative. ...
Source: Psychology of Pain - March 3, 2014 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
Sensitization and Catastrophizing: Introspection Confirmed Experimentally | Pain Research Forum
In this study, repeated thermal stimuli were applied to participants' forearms, producing hyperalgesia. Half the participants were given a cognitive intervention to reduce their stress response to the painful stimuli by identifying negative cognitions and reappraising the situation. In comparison with a control condition, the cognitive intervention led to reduced unpleasantness ratings. The authors conclude, "Reduction in secondary hyperalgesia was associated with reduced pain catastrophizing, suggesting that changes in central sensitization are related to changes in pain-related cognitions. Thus, we demonstrate t...
Source: Psychology of Pain - March 1, 2014 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
Itching: More Than Skin-Deep - NYTimes.com
The experiment was not for the squirmish. Volunteers were made to itch like crazy on one arm, but not allowed to scratch. Then they were whisked into an M.R.I. scanner to see what parts of their brains lit up when they itched, when researchers scratched them and when they were finally allowed to scratch themselves.
The scientific question was this: Why does it feel so good to scratch an itch?
"It's quite intriguing to see how many brain centers are activated," said Dr. Gil Yosipovitch, chairman of dermatology at the Temple University School of Medicine and director of the Temple Center for Itch (he conducte...
Source: Psychology of Pain - February 18, 2014 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
When A Prescription For Pain Pills Becomes A Gateway To Addiction : Shots - Health News : NPR
On the surface, the 39-year-old construction worker looks like any other patient with back pain. He came to the Washington, D.C., emergency room, where I work, in severe discomfort after moving heavy cinder blocks a few days before.The pain gets worse with twisting and bending, but he has no numbness or weakness in his legs. There's no tenderness along his spine, no difficulty urinating, no fever, so there's nothing to suggest a fracture, infection, spinal cord mass or anything other than a muscle strain.The resident I'm supervising orders a Percocet pill, a sensible option we choose almost every day. But the patient refus...
Source: Psychology of Pain - February 15, 2014 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
The Collective Good: Pooling Data to Boost Brain Imaging Research | Pain Research Forum
The world of chronic pain research now has its eyes on the brain. Some quality of the brain—whether a particular gray matter distribution or the idiosyncratic configuration of a network—might be the key to the perpetuation of pain perception long after an initial injury, according to a growing number of studies. However, finding that cerebral essence is hindered by the fact that most brain imaging studies of chronic pain are limited to small numbers of patients due to cost and practicality. Several researchers are now aiming to get more from those studies by establishing new resources that allow the sharing of mag...
Source: Psychology of Pain - February 11, 2014 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
Pain | VQR Online
My father was never one to complain. On the morning of the day he died, an ulcer he'd suffered from for years, and left untreated, ruptured and began to bleed. Two days later I met with the town coroner. He told me the end had been painless, that, as his life leached away, my father would only have felt increasingly weak and light-headed. The coroner, trying to make me feel better, was lying. By any other account, when an ulcer perforates and blood, bile, bacteria, and partially digested food begin to spill into the abdominal cavity, you feel as if a knife has just been buried in your guts. You might faint. You migh...
Source: Psychology of Pain - February 7, 2014 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
Ouch! Pain threshold genes amplified by lifestyle - life - 04 February 2014 - New Scientist
If you flinch where others merely frown, you might want to take a look at your lifestyle. That's because environmental factors may have retuned your genes to make you more sensitive to pain."We know that stressful life events such as diet, smoking, drinking and exposure to pollution all have effects on your genes, but we didn't know if they specifically affected pain genes," says Tim Spector of King's College London.Now, a study of identical twins suggests they do. It seems that epigenetic changes – environmentally triggered chemical alterations that affect how active your genes are – can dial your ...
Source: Psychology of Pain - February 6, 2014 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
