When the pain is chronic, it can become the cause of a disability for those affected, altering the possibility of leading a normal life and preventing them from carrying out daily tasks such as working, enjoying social activities or doing housework.
But as we are going to see, back pain is not only expressed in the back . We know that chronic pain is related to changes in the brain . A study by researchers from Germany and Australia has used the voxel-based morphometry technique for high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging to analyze which areas of the brain are most affected in patients with chronic back pain .
The experiment, carried out by Hans Christian Fritz and his collaborators, involved 111 chronic back pain patients who were compared to 432 pain-free people. Importantly, this study also controlled for the effects of medication in a considerably large sample of patients, compared to previous studies.
The results, recently published in The Journal of Pain (2016), showed that chronic back pain was related to a reduction in the cerebral gray matter of certain brain areas: the prefrontal cortex in its ventrolateral, dorsolateral and medial areas, and in the anterior insula . When analyzing other variables measured in the study, such as pain intensity, it was observed that the greater the pain intensity, the lower the gray matter volume in dorsolateral and ventrolateral prefrontal areas as well as in the anterior cingulate .
The authors conclude that chronic back pain is associated with alterations in areas of the brain that are responsible for processing pain and emotions. These findings may help to better understand how pain affects people who suffer from it. These areas of the brain are also involved in the functioning of attention and working memory, and it will be interesting to dedicate efforts to find out how these cognitive processes can be affected by chronic pain as well.
Marisa Fernández is Senior Neuropsychologist at Unobrain
