Have chronic pain? What you need to know about your pain management options

 

Everyone deals with pain at one time or another. Perhaps you’ve temporarily suffered from a cluster or tension headache, or a muscle spasm.

Pain that lasts for two months or longer can be called Chronic Pain. Chronic Pain, often stress-related, can feel like it is bodily pain, localized or generalized, but mostly it’s generated by misfiring pain circuits in the brain. For some, the cause is arthritis or other health condition, such as Fibromyalgia, a muscular-skeletal disorder, often causing pain receptors to go into hyperdrive. Ignoring this kind of pain can have dangerous consequences, and can lead to many other problems, such as:

• Impact your daily activities
• Sleep disturbance, disruption of regular eating habits
• Make it difficult to focus
• Can lead to Anxiety and Depression
• Detract from quality time with friends and family

Those with Chronic Pain describe symptoms in various ways, as aching, burning, shooting, squeezing, stiffness, stinging, or throbbing. Living with Chronic Pain can be emotionally and physically challenging.

There are various kinds of treatment approaches that can help with pain management:

• Prescription drugs are used to treat several kinds of severe pain, but they can be highly addictive. Users tend to replicate with higher doses to obtain the same desired effect.
• Corticosteroids work by reducing the immune system’s inflammatory response. But there can be various side effects, such as difficulty sleeping, weight gain, high blood sugar.
• Short term counselling may reduce the reaction to chronic pain.
• Physical therapy: various meds including antidepressants are used to treat pain
• Other methods include medication, Yoga and EEG Biofeedback, which, it is suggested, should be performed safely by a professional therapist. EEG Biofeedback – Neurofeedback – can alter control of pain by altering connectivity between brain regions, thus bringing lasting changes in neuronal networks.

LENS Neurofeedback is used to treat Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue, Migraine. Biofeedback measures physiological activity (Autonomic Nervous System), which includes heartbeat, breathing, muscle activity, skin temperature – a monitoring system, leading to changes in thinking and emotional control processes.

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Brain ripples drop sugar levels in rats

Ripples of nerve cell activity that lock in memories may have an unexpected job outside of the brain: dropping blood sugar levels in the body.

Soon after a burst of ripples in a rat’s hippocampus, a brain structure that plays a key role in memory, sugar levels elsewhere in the body dipped, new experiments show. The curveball results, reported August 11 in Nature, suggest that certain types of brain activity and blood sugar control – a key part of metabolism – are entwined in surprising and mysterious ways.

“This paper represents a significant advance in our understanding of how the hippocampus modulates metabolism,” says Elizabeth Gould, a neuroscientist at Princeton University who wasn’t involved in the study.

Neural shudders are called sharp-wave ripples zig and zag in the brains of people as they learn new things and draw memories back up (SN: 9/14/19, p.14). Ripples also feature prominently during deep sleep and are thought to accompany the neural work of transforming short-term knowledge into long-term memories.

Neuroscientist David Tingley, now at Harvard University, wondered whether these signals might also change something outside of the brain. Tingley and colleagues fitted continuous glucose monitors onto the backs of eight rats. The researchers simultaneously measured the rats’ brain waves with electrodes implanted in the hippocampus.

About 10 minutes after a bout of ripples, blood sugar levels in the body fell, the monitors showed. “We saw these dips in the second rat, and the third rat, and the fourth rat,” says coauthor Gyorgy Buzsaki, a neuroscientist at New York University Grossman School of Medicine. “It was super consistent. The magnitude is small, but [the dips] are always there.”

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