It's all in the mind so think that pain away

Dec 14 2005

According to U.S. researchers chronic discomfort can be reduced by brain manipulation and people in chronic pain can "think away" their suffering by learning to manipulate the activity of the brain.

Apparently scientists at Stanford University in California, have successfully taught eight patients to reduce pain from injuries by showing them live scans of their brains while they performed a set of mental exercises.

Their findings have opened up new possibilities for treating chronic pain, which often responds poorly to standard therapy and leaves patients suffering throughout their entire lives.

The study suggests that it may be possible to train people to change the way in which the pain centers of the brain process painful stimuli, making the perception of pain less intense.

Sean Mackey, who led the research, says that pain has a huge impact on individuals, their families and society.

Mackey believes, even though significantly more science and testing must be done before this can be considered a treatment for chronic pain, the discovery could dramatically change people’s lives.

Dr Mackey’s team used a new scanning technique, known as real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging, to capture live images of activity in a part of the brain called the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, that handles painful stimuli.

As the patients watched the scans, they did mental exercises designed to alter brain activity and reduce pain.

The goal was to train the brain to process pain in a different way, so that the patients would experience it less severely.

What the scans did was to allow the subjects to see what effect their thoughts were having on a small region of the brain, helping them to concentrate on changing its activity.

Dr Mackey says they were asked to think about changing the meaning of the pain, and instead of thinking of it as a terrible experience, to think of it as something relatively pleasant.

He says over time, the subjects showed an increased ability to modulate their pain.

Dr Mackey says they are still unclear how the patients achieved this, but that it had worked for all eight subjects, with five reporting that their pain had reduced in intensity by 50 per cent or more.

One participant who had suffered from back pain since a riding accident seven years ago, said that her symptoms had reduced considerably since she took part in the study.

The study involved a series of controls to check that the imaging process was having a direct impact on the patients’ pain, and that their improved perception was not the result of a placebo effect.

Dr Mackey says they did ask themselves at times whether they had just designed the world’s most expensive placebo.

In one control group, volunteers were asked to try to control pain without being scanned, and in another they were scanned but not shown the images.

A third group was shown images of a part of the brain that does not process pain, while a fourth was shown images of another person’s brain.

None of the other control groups showed an improvement in pain symptoms, while all the patients in the study group had benefits.

The research is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.