Fascinating article today for you if you are a chronic pain sufferer. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could identify how the brain is ‘triggering’ pain and stop it?
Researchers have been working on how to do just that. They found different areas of the brain and different signals were involved in chronic and acute pain. People almost had a kind of pain ‘fingerprint’. If that can be identified, the hope is that pain relief could be targeted directly at that fingerprint.
Ideally, it will eventually be possible to deliver personalized brain stimulation only when it is needed, to minimize potential side effects. The only way to do that is to gain a better understanding of the brain activity patterns that herald the onset of pain in a particular patient, and how these relate to the patient’s experience – and that is precisely what this study has started to do.
The study is published in Nature Neuroscience.
You can read the article here: Chronic Pain Detected Directly From The Human Brain For The First Time