“The hope is that now that we know where these signals live and now that we know what kind of signals to look for, we could try to track them non-invasively,” he says. “As we recruit more patients, or better characterize how these signals vary between people, maybe we can use it for diagnosis.”
The researchers also found that they were able to distinguish a patient’s chronic pain from deliberately inflicted acute pain using a thermal probe. The chronic pain signals came from a different part of the brain, suggesting that it’s not just a prolonged version of acute pain, but something else entirely.
Because different people experience pain in different ways, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to dealing with it, which has proven to be a huge challenge in the past. The team hopes that mapping people’s biomarkers will allow them to better target the therapeutic use of electrical brain stimulation, a treatment that Shirvalkar likens to turning pain on or off like a thermostat.
The findings could be a big leap in pain treatment and could be particularly useful for treating people with chronic pain who have difficulty communicating, says Ben Seymour, professor of clinical neuroscience at the University of Oxford, who was not involved. in the project.
“This opens a new door to smart pain technologies, so I think this is a very important engineering hurdle that has now been overcome,” he says.
It also demonstrates the intensely personal ways in which people experience pain and the importance of tailoring treatments to each individual, Shirvalkar adds.
“It’s clear that grief is so complex, and that individual people are so complex, that the only way to really hear and see them is to let them tell their side of the story,” she says.
