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Chronic Pain

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White line art on black background of three figures with red gradients over their heads to represent pain/migraine
Chronic Pain

Managing Pain

Our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about pain can affect the actual physical pain that we feel. What does pain look like in the brain, and how are new research findings leading to effective new treatments?
Chronic Pain

Migraine: The Road to New Targeted Drugs

Research from four labs in different parts of the world led to a major breakthrough—and the 2021 Brain Prize

The 2021 Brain Prize went to four individuals whose independent research led to useful treatments for a disorder affecting a billion people.
Chronic Pain

Pain Awareness Month Interview: Howard Fields

Pain expert Howard Fields, Ph.D., discusses opioids, pain management, and helping the roughly 20 percent of US adults who experience chronic pain.

Chronic Pain

Alabama to Beijing… and Back: The Search for a Pain Gene

Adapted from his book, Chasing Men on Fire: The Story of the Search for a Pain Gene, our author provides the tale of discovering a gene for pain.
brain-with-barbed-wire-cartoon
Chronic Pain

Finding the Hurt in Pain

Pain is unique to every person, and difficult to quantify and treat. Our author examines how brain imaging is opening our eyes to the richness and complexity of the pain experience, giving us extraordinary insight into the neurochemistry, network activity, wiring, and structures relevant to producing and modulating painful experiences in all their various guises.
Chronic Pain

Tangled up in Blue: The Complexity of Chronic Pain

This event reports on recent findings from neuroscience and medicine that are influencing views on pain management and helping guide decisions on treatments, better approaches to educating health professionals, and in policymaking.
Chronic Pain

The Patterns of Pain Relief

Using a data-mining method and fMRI results from eight separate clinical trials testing pain medicines, Oxford researchers find evidence of consistent patterns of brain activity. Such a definite pattern might be used before human trials to choose which new drug to test, or after, to see if it is working in a particular patient.
woman holding her neck
Chronic Pain

A Future Without Chronic Pain

Neuroscience and Clinical Research

Chronic pain affects 1.5 billion people worldwide, an estimated 100 million of whom live in the United States. Yet we currently have no effective treatment options. Fortunately, research advances have determined some of the ways in which chronic pain changes the brain, and several promising research areas could lead to better treatment approaches. Dr. David Borsook recommends steps to facilitate these new treatments, including the establishment of integrated clinical neuroscience centers bridging the gap between bench and bedside.
Chronic Pain

“Cosmetic Neurology” and the Problem of Pain

Is taking a drug to lessen the pain of our common daily struggles a “cosmetic” enhancement of human life, even a danger to character, or is it an ethical choice?
Chronic Pain

Why Not a National Institute on Pain Research?

Today, patients who once would have lived in chronic pain or died in agony can be helped because research has debunked many myths about our most potent pain medication: opioids. Even long-term treatment with opioids seldom leads to addiction, and research has taught us much about how opioids act in the brain. Now, research is opening entirely new avenues for pain relief. But a pioneer in pain research and treatment warns that future progress requires much greater public understanding and more informed government regulation.
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