Doctors have found why chronic pain can persist, even if the injury that caused it has passed.
Chronic pain devastates lives and is found in about one out of seven people, affecting more than 1.5 billion people worldwide.
This disease is defined as pain that lasts three months or more and can be caused by sports injuries, various diseases and aging. Now scientists from king’s College London has discovered why chronic pain can persist, even if the injury that caused it has passed.
Despite the wide range of causes of chronic pain, the result is often the same – an extremely sensitive nervous system that reacts to stimuli much stronger than usual.
Until now it was unclear why the nervous system maintains this active state for a very long period, especially in cases when injury or illness that caused the pain disappeared. The researchers tried to answer this question, having considered the immune cells in the nervous system, which are known to play an important role in the development of permanent pain.
According to experts, even the most innocuous injuries leave the so-called molecular “footprints” for some of the genes in immune cells. The existence of these “traces” means that the genes carry a “memory” of the initial injury. In the result, the nerves remain active for a long period of time, which ultimately leads to chronic pain.
