Chronic pain could be caused in part by powerful memory, a new study says Cross-talk between brain regions involved in memory is higher among whiplash patients who wind up with chronic pain Managing anxiety and injury pain might reduce risk of chronic pain FRIDAY, Oct. 25, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- Brain scans can provide early warning of who will develop chronic pain following a whiplash injury, a new study finds. Higher levels of “cross talk” between two specific brain regions within one to three days of the injury increases the risk that pain will last long-term, researchers found.
The more the hippocampus (the brain’s memory center) talked to the cortex (involved in long-term memory), the more likely a person was to develop chronic pain, results showed. In addition, the higher a person’s anxiety was immediately after a whiplash accident, the more precisely doctors could predict the chronic pain they would feel a year later. These results highlight the role that memory plays in a person’s pain perception, said lead researcher Paulo Branco , an assistant professor of anesthesiology and pain medicine at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine.
“While we commonly think of pain as relating only to an injury, it is the brain that actually makes up the pain experience,” Branco said in a Northwestern news release. “The brain makes the decision about whether a movement should be painful or not, and we think this may rely on previous experiences stored .
