This post was originally published on this site
After developing chronic pain, I started looking into what scientists do — and still don’t — understand about the disease. Here is what I learned.
Most of us don’t think about pain until we have it. And when we do, it’s typically something we get over after a few days or weeks. That was my own experience, until the summer of 2023. One day I woke to find that my arms hurt. There was no obvious explanation, nothing I’d done. The pain was intense. I couldn’t do much of anything: drive, cook, type, even sleep. I’d always been a healthy person who did a lot of sports, and I figured this strange pain was just bad luck. But as weeks turned into months, and no cause or treatment could be found, I began to realize that I wasn’t alone: that all around me was an ongoing epidemic of chronic pain.
As my condition persisted, I started looking into what scientists do — and still don’t — understand about chronic pain. Mostly I was shocked to learn how little we know about its causes. But I also discovered that we’re now on the cusp of a revolution, one that is already transforming how we think about — and treat — chronic pain. (Read the full magazine article.)
Chronic pain is not just a symptom, but a disease.
We used to think that we may die in pain but don’t die of it. Now chronic pain is often considered an illness in its own right, one that occurs when our nerves become hyperactivated or “sensitized.” This can happen even if we have healed from the injury to which we can trace our pain — or for no reason at all. Scientists used to be mystified by persistent pain but now recognize that chronic pain is a disorder of the central nervous system. In some cases, pain signals just keep firing, driven by what researchers now think is a complex set of genetic, endocrinological and immunologic processes.
A quarter of the world’s population suffers from chronic pain.
In the United States some 100 million people have chronic pain; globally, it’s as many as two billion. Despite these numbers, and the financial, physical and emotional toll that chronic pain takes, it has received only a fraction of the funding that diseases like cancer and diabetes have. And there is no national center for the study of chronic pain. But researchers are finally beginning to understand the underlying mechanisms of pain — and how to treat it.
Some people are more likely to suffer chronic pain than others.
Women are more likely to develop chronic pain than men. No one is entirely sure why, but researchers point to two possible reasons: because women are at higher risk for autoimmune disorders, and because their hormonal fluctuations can aggravate pain. What we do know is that developing chronic pain isn’t necessarily a product of the severity of your illness. Some people with relatively mild tissue damage experience terrible pain, while others with severe damage feel mostly fine. And once a person has one kind of chronic pain, they’re more likely to develop another.
Researchers now believe that chronic pain, like cancer, could end up having a range of genetic and cellular drivers that vary both by condition and by the particular makeup of the person experiencing it.