Quote:Despite this, chronic pain has made me happier. On the face of it I'm now pretty much normal, although I don't drink much and am almost always in bed by 1 AM. I rollerblade everywhere and run 5K in a respectable time. But at every given moment, my entire body is in pain. The first years of this were, by and large, horrific. There are a lot of very bad ways to approach chronic pain, and I've tried them all. It beats the hell out of you. It breaks you down completely. But then you get to build yourself up again from scratch.

Zgarbas Wrote:I think he meant rollerblading despite the pain. If you gotta hurt, do it whilst having fun, right?

Quote:People who suffer from chronic pain often feel like the experience dominates their lives, and changes them profoundly. Now, a group of pain researchers and geneticists have discovered that this feeling isn't far from scientific truth. Being in chronic pain changes the way your brain functions on a physical level. The good news is that you can also change it back.

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Tajerian and Alvarado's work centered on mice who suffered a nerve injury that put them in chronic pain. Over a period of months, they discovered that the pain was affecting regions of the mice's brains that had nothing to do with processing pain. In fact, they found that gene activity had been severely curtailed in the prefrontal cortex, a brain area that serves as the seat of higher reason and decision-making, as well as many emotions, in both rodents and humans.

"We saw chemical changes to the DNA in [the prefrontal cortex]," Alvarado told io9. Specifically, they found a 12 percent downward shift in DNA activity. "That's really big," he added. "Normally these changes are associated with cancer." This lack of activity, Tajerian said, leads to a loss of density in this region of the brain -- which ultimately causes cognitive impairment, depression and anxiety.

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After two months, the mice in the enriched environment did not suffer chronic pain any longer. Or rather, their prefrontal cortexes showed normal mouse activity. Meanwhile, the impoverished mice showed the reduction in brain activity, which led to cognitive impairment. Along with colleagues, the two published a paper in PLoS One about the study earlier this year. The paper provides strong evidence that chronic pain is an epigenetic phenomenon, a life experience that actually changes gene expression in the brain.

Translated into human terms, this means that some people experience chronic pain because they have literally rewired their brains to be more sensitive to pain. The more pain they feel, the more anxious and vulnerable they are to feeling further pain.

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"A different environment will give you a different experience of pain. By changing the environment we could change the pain,"

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Tajerian and Alvarado's work shows, as Tajerian puts it, "you are a different person" after an injury. But that person can change again, into somebody who "cares about the pain less." She suggests that their discoveries help illuminate why meditation and mindfulness can help with pain. "Even cursing can help you care about the pain less," she laughed. These activities are all ways of changing our environment, and our brains, by making us calmer or allowing us to express feelings.