May 18, 2011 - chronic lower back pain is not only hurt. It also seems to cause a thinning of certain regions of the brain, which can cause cognitive impairments, shows a study.
Researchers studying the link between pain and such thinning had hoped that treat back pain successfully stop this process. Instead, it reversed it. Six months after surgery or spinal injections, a region of the brain associated with pain - the prefrontal cortex Dorsolateral - had thickened.
"We thought he would be able to slow down thinning, but actually recover was surprising,", says the study researcher Laura s. Stone, Ph.d., neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal.
The study is published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
Pierre and his colleagues recruitment 18 patients who sought treatment for the chronic lower back pain, which they had at least a year. Before the treatment to each patient had an MRI for measuring cortical thickness and to evaluate brain activity in a simple cognitive test. Fourteen of these patients have suffered similar tests a year and a half later. Their tests were compared to analyses of 16 people without back pain.
"The extent of thickening was surprising for us," said study investigator David a. Seminowicz, Ph.d., the University of Maryland dental school. "Each patient who had less pain or disability after treatment showed thickening in this area".
This area is the cortex prefrontal Dorsolateral, which plays an important role in how we perceive the pain. While he was the only region of the brain which showed a significant thickening after treatment, several other areas seem to improve.
"There was a trend in many different areas to get thicker," said Seminowicz, who is now planning studies to study the impact in the long term to deal with back on the brain.
Pain is also demands increased on the brain. Low back pain patients show an abnormal amount of brain activity when they perform the same tasks as those that are not of this malaise. They often have difficulty concentrating, explains Pierre. Tests, they show the capacities impaired in cognitive tasks and decision-making, which could be related to the influence of diverting the attention of the pain and the requirements put on the brain.
Pierre did not measure how patients perform on cognitive tests. But his study shows that patients who underwent successful treatment for back pain had cerebral activation levels approaching those of healthy people.
While the pain seems to be the cause of thinning, he did not understand exactly how it arrives, explains Pierre.
"Is this the cells die. Or other things produce? Decrease the cells? We don't know, "she said." "But if we can understand what causes thinning and thickening, we can develop therapies that target this mechanism."
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