Brain Drain, Too many worries already

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Chronic Pain Shrinks People's Brains

By Roy Britt

LiveScience Senior Writer

posted: 22 November, 2004

5:00 p.m. ET

Pain causes an unexpected brain drain, according to a

new study in which the brains of people with chronic

backaches were up to 11 percent smaller than those of

non-sufferers.

People afflicted with other long-term pain and stress

might face similar brain shrinkage, said study leader

A. Vania Apkarian of Northwestern University.

The results suggest those with constant pain lose gray

matter equal to an oversized pea for each year of

pain. Gray matter is an outer layer of the brain rich

in nerve cells and crucial to information and memory

processing.

The results don't reveal why the brain shrinks, but it

might involve degradation of neurons, which are the

signal transmitters of the mind and body.

" It is possible it's just the stress of having to live

with the condition, " Apkarian told LiveScience. " The

neurons become overactive or tired of the activity. "

Another possibility is that people born with smaller

numbers of neurons are predisposed to suffering

chronic pain. But some of the differences measured

" must be directly related to the condition, " Apkarian

said.

The research involved a one-time brain scan of 26

people who'd had unrelenting back pain for at least a

year (and in one case for up to 35 years), along with

a pain-free control group. Pain sufferers had lost 5

to 11 percent of gray matter over and above what

normal aging would take away.

" People who have had pain for longer times have had

more brain atrophy, " Apkarian said.

No attempt was made to correlate brain size to brain

function. It is possible that some of the shrinkage

involves relatively noncrucial tissue -- other than

neurons -- and that some of the effects are reversible

if the pain is eliminated, Apkarian and colleagues

write in the Nov. 23 issue of the Journal of

Neuroscience.

Apkarian said other varieties of pain might cause a

similar atrophy of gray matter, and he plans to study

that possibility in future studies.

" Suffering of pain is fundamentally an emotional

condition, " Apkarian said. " Different types of pain

will have different types of emotional parameters,

which will probably result in different types of

atrophy -- different amounts and in different brain regions. "

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