Rewiring Of Brain Responsible For Baffling Chronic Pain

New finding by scientists at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine begin to explain the causation of the mysterious condition of chronic pain. When looking into the brains of people with a baffling chronic pain condition, they discovered that their brains looked as if the areas related to emotion, pain perception and the temperature of their skin has been "rewired". Complex region pain syndrome (CRPS.) Is a pernicious and nasty condition that usually begins with an injury causing significant damage to the hand or the foot. For the majority of people, the pain from the injury disappears once the limb is healed. However, for 5 percent of the patients, the pain rages on long past the healing, sometimes for the rest of people's lives. About 200,00 people in the U.S. have this condition.The physiological changes take place in the brain's white matter. These changes cause the gray matter to atrophy. White matter reorganization is related to intesnsity and duration of their pain. It is unknown if CRPS causes these changes or if these people have preexisting abnormalities that make them more predisposed to experience these changes.

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