Advancing Our Understanding of Fibromyalgia Pain New research funded, in part, by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) is opening the door to our brains to try to understand more about the pain associated with Fibromyalgia. Using MRI, researchers observed dramatic differences in two distinct portions of the brain that play important roles in how we prepare for, and perceive, pain. The periaqueductal gray area which, in healthy people, becomes active when the brain is cued that a painful sensation is incoming, as well as the ventral tegmental area, a regulator of the pain-relieving chemical dopamine, both under-respond in Fibromyalgia patients as compared to study participants without a FM diagnosis. The study authors used an MRI to scan each participants brain as a blood pressure cuff painfully squeezed the patients calf, said study author Dr. Marco Loggia, from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston… It gives a very deep, muscular type of pain, Loggia said. Its closer to the clinical pain that a patient with fibromyalgia experiences. Patients also received a visual cue that told them when the cuff would begin squeezing their calf and when the cuff would release its grip, allowing researchers to see how the brain would respond to anticipation of both pain and relief. As expected, the people with fibromyalgia needed much less pressure to reach the same pain rating as a healthy person, Loggia said. But the doctors also noticed key differences in the way certain parts of their brain dealt with pain before, during and after. (source: nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_142219.html) There is so much to be understood about Fibromyalgia pain. We don’t want to stop at just a clinical reaction of the FM patient at the point of pain. Getting a handle on why FM patients experience pain in often an intensely different way than other patients without FM will help us begin to tailor more effective relief for our patients with this condition...currently surrounded by more questions than answers.
Posted on: Wed, 29 Jan 2014 17:53:14 +0000