Chronic back pain and brain atrophy

Apkarian, A. V., Sosa, Y., Sonty, S., Levy, R. M., Harden, R. N., Parrish, T. B., et al. (2004). Chronic Back Pain Is Associated with Decreased Prefrontal and Thalamic Gray Matter Density. J. Neurosci., 24(46), 10410-10415.

In a report released in 2004, researchers made comparisons in the morphometry (the measure of shape) among for normal people and patients with chronic back pains. This study involves the use of the MRI technique on 26 patients with chronic back pain and 26 matched health individuals. In addition, the patients with chronic back pains are separated into two different groups with one group exhibiting sciatic pain and the other group without neuropathic etiology.

Patients with chronic back pain were found to have 5-10% less neocortical gray matter volume when compared to the normal and the amount of loss is related to the duration of the pain where longer duration predicts higher amount of loss.

In addition, it was found that the density of gray matter is reduced in bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and right thalamus for chronic back pain patients when comparing to the normal. In addition, the reduction is larger in the neuropathic patients than in the non-neuropathic patients.

In other words, what this article tries to tell us is that... pains hurt your brain anatomically and, again, pains are beyond feelings (while the beyong feeling study came after this article and looked at the functional level using the fMRI technique).