Read an interesting article from the NYT (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/health/woman-pain-anxiety.html) on some genes found that caused the subject to live her life with significantly reduced pain sensations. It is obviously a lay article but still somewhat interesting in my opinion.
@Austin_Baraki , as pain science overlord, do you happen to know if there is a medical case study that is out regarding this and, if so, can you elaborate on the specific pathway changes that they found were causing the reduction in pain sensations in the brain?
I read it on my phone and must have missed the case study link in there but I appreciate the additional links as well. It’s been really interesting to start exploring down this pain science rabbit hole (I have like 10-15 tabs open from painscience.com right now that I’m slowly working my way through) and just in general coming more to this bioosychosocial model for a lot of things. Trying to learn more to help myself a little bit but my wife more so because she has some issue with neck pain and other stuff.
So I have a question that I don’t know if you’ll have an answer to based on the reading.
If pain seems to be a learned behavior from the brain through nociception, would changing the genes in the woman in question so nociception functions at a normalized level cause her brain to learn pain such that even if she then returned to her previous state virtually zero nociception still cause elevated pain levels? The study mentioned continued research into using this adaptation for potential gene thereapies into converse idea of how much positive effect the sudden absence of nociception would elicit in people that have otherwise already learned the pain behavior in the brain but I was curious if the behavior could be acquired after such a long history without it.