Report: To ease spouse's pain, just leave the room

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Last Updated: 11:52 pm, Sunday, November 3rd, 2002

Report: To ease spouse's pain, just leave the room

By Los Angeles Times

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ORLANDO, Fla. - Scientists have proved what so many have long suspected:

The very presence of your solicitous spouse can be a pain.

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By eavesdropping on electrical activity in the most private precincts of

the mind, researchers investigating the effects of chronic pain

discovered that a husband or wife can make the ache feel three times

worse simply by being in the room.

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All they had to do to make their spouses feel better, the neural probes

revealed, was leave.

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The new research, made public here Sunday at a meeting of 24,000

neuroscientists, offers the first clear neural evidence that social

experiences can directly alter the way the brain responds to the kind of

chronic pain experienced by more than 97 million people in the United

States.

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Chronic pain, the researchers concluded, can become embedded in the

give-and-take of a relationship, even at the fundamental level of brain

anatomy.

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Neuroscientists in Germany studied 20 couples in which one partner

suffered from severe chronic back pain.

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The researchers monitored the patient's brain activity with an array of

electrodes that recorded the involuntary, physiological responses of

nerve cells and synapses. They then gave the patients painful electric

shocks to their aching backs and studied the brain's responses.

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They found that some spouses measurably boosted the patient's neural

pain responses just by sitting near them in the laboratory.