Back Pain Press Releases

The structure of the brain may predict whether a person will suffer chronic low back pain, according to researchers who used brain scans. The results, published in the journal Pain, support the growing idea that the brain plays a critical role in chronic pain, a concept that may lead to changes in the way doctors treat patients. The research was supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of the National Institutes of Health.

Hundreds of NIH-funded studies are being presented at the 2012 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting. Here, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke has highlighted a selection of studies and events led by our grantees.

A new NIH-funded study shows that a specific gene variant in humans affects both sensitivity to short-term (acute) pain in healthy volunteers and the risk of developing chronic pain after one kind of back surgery. Blocking increased activity of this gene after nerve injury or inflammation in animals prevented development of chronic pain.

Pain is an extremely disabling condition leading to an annual cost of $65 billion lost in work productivity and 4 billion work days. It also accounts for 40 million visits per year to physicians for "new" pain and $3 billion in sales each year of over-the-counter analgesics. Scientists studying animal models with support from the National Institutes of Health have found that a chemical, called neurokinin A, may be responsible for the body's response to moderate-to-intense pain. This finding, reported in the March 26, 1998, issue of Nature, may eventually lead to new treatments for pain.

Aurora K. Pajeau, M.D.,M.P.H., a clinical associate in the Neuroepidemiology Branch of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) will present preliminary findings from the first door-to-door prevalence study of tropical spastic paraparesis (TSP) associated with HTLV-I in Jamaica at the 6th International Conference on Human Retrovirology: HTLV.