How Your Brain Remembers Chronic Pain

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Chronic pain is a common disease that affects more than one million people in Switzerland alone. Unfortunately, in a lot of cases, proper treatment strategies are missing.

Thomas Nevian from the Department of Physiology at the University of Bern says:

“The constant perception of pain severely influences the quality of life of the patients and represents an extraordinary emotional burden.  Thus, understanding the development of chronic pain is of outmost importance for neuroscience research.”

With fellow researcher Mirko Santello, Nevian has discovered a cellular mechanism in the brain of mice that contributes to the development of chronic pain. The findings of the two Bernese researchers resulted in the development of a unique pharmacological treatment strategy for chronic pain.

Pain Memory

Nevian and Santello investigated the modification of neurons by chronic pain in a brain region called Gyrus Cinguli, which is associated with the emotional aspects of pain. In this context the establishment of a “pain memory” plays an important role, as Thomas Nevian explains:

“The neurons are constantly activated by a noxious stimulus, thus building a memory trace for pain that becomes irreversible. Our idea was to understand this mechanism better to derive potential new treatment strategies.”

Pain is perceived by electrical impulses in the neurons. Therefore, the two researchers were searching for changes in the electrical properties of neurons in the limbic system.

They found that neurons were more excitable in the Gyrus Cinguli. This was attributable to a downregulation of a specific ion channel, a protein in the cell membrane that determines the electrical properties of the cell.

That led to an increased number of nerve impulses in these cells and thus to an increased perception of pain.

Santello and Nevian tried to manipulate this ion channel to reestablish its functionality. By activating a specific receptor sensitive to the neuromodulator serotonin they succeeded in reestablishing a normal function of the neuron. This reduced the pain perception in an animal model.

“It has been known for some time that serotonin can modulate pain perception and the function of some drugs is based on this,” Thomas Nevian says. “Nevertheless, what is new in our study now is that we were able to identify a specific subtype of serotonin receptor that reduced the perception of pain more efficiently. This is an important result, which might help to treat chronic pain more efficiently in the future.”

The results of the study also imply a new mechanism for how established drugs of the tricyclic class of antidepressants work. So far it was assumed that these drugs act in the periphery on nociceptors and in the spinal cord.

The two scientists demonstrated that these drugs can also act directly on the perception of pain in the brain. However, Thomas Nevian emphasizes that

“even though we made an important step forward now, it will take some time before novel drugs will be designed based on our results.”

Reference:
  1. Mirko Santello, Thomas Nevian. Dysfunction of cortical dendritic integration in neuropathic pain reversed by serotoninergic neuromodulation. Neuron, March 2015 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2015.03.003

Last Updated on October 9, 2023