Discovery of ‘objective biomarker’ raises hopes for new treatments for people living with intractable pain
Brain signals that reveal how much pain a person is in have been discovered by scientists who say the work is a step towards radical new treatments for people living with debilitating chronic pain.
“What we’ve learned is that chronic pain can successfully be tracked and predicted in the real world, while patients are walking the dog, or at home, when they get up in the morning, and when they are going about their lives,” said Prasad Shirvalkar, a neurologist and lead researcher on the project at the University of California, San Francisco.
Several times a day, the volunteers were asked to complete short surveys on the strength and type of pain they were experiencing, and then record snapshots of their brain activity. Armed with the survey responses and brain recordings, the scientists found they could train an algorithm to predict a person’s pain based on the electrical signals in their OFC. “We’ve developed an objective biomarker for that type of pain,” said Shirvalkar.
“Chronic pain is not just a more enduring version of acute pain, it is fundamentally different in the brain,” Shirvalkar said. “The hope is, as we understand this better, that we can use the information to develop personalised brain stimulation therapies for the most severe forms of pain.”that are investigating a procedure called deep brain stimulation to control chronic pain. Deep brain stimulation sends electrical pulses into the brain to disrupt problematic signals.
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