New research from the University of Colorado Boulder has uncovered a key brain circuit that decides whether short-term pain becomes long-lasting chronic pain.
The discovery, made in an animal study, offers hope for new treatments that could one day help people manage or even prevent chronic pain without relying on opioids.
The study was published in The Journal of Neuroscience. It focuses on a small, deep area of the brain called the caudal granular insular cortex (CGIC).
Scientists found that this part of the brain plays a powerful role in telling the body to keep feeling pain, even after an injury has healed.
Linda Watkins, the senior author and a professor of behavioral neuroscience, explained that the CGIC acts as a “decision-maker.”
It sends signals to the spinal cord to continue passing along pain messages. If this brain circuit is shut down, chronic pain doesn’t happen. And if someone already has chronic pain, switching off this circuit makes the pain stop.
The research comes at a time when scientists are excited by new tools that let them study the brain in greater detail than ever before. With these tools, researchers can now target small groups of specific brain cells and see exactly how they behave. This could lead to safer treatments that avoid the risks of opioid medications.
Jayson Ball, the lead author of the study, said that the team used advanced techniques to track which brain cells light up when a nerve injury happens. They used fluorescent markers and a method called chemogenetics to turn brain cell activity on or off. This allowed them to observe the exact role of the CGIC in the pain process.
They found that the CGIC plays only a small role in handling normal pain—the kind you feel when you stub your toe, for example. But it becomes very important when it comes to ongoing pain that doesn’t go away.
After a nerve injury in rats, the CGIC told the somatosensory cortex—the brain’s main pain center—to keep the pain going. This message then traveled to the spinal cord, where it made even light touches feel painful, a condition called allodynia.
Importantly, when the team blocked this brain pathway immediately after an injury, the rats recovered quickly. And in rats that already had chronic pain, turning off this circuit made their pain disappear.
About one in four adults suffers from chronic pain, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Many of these people deal with nerve-related pain and allodynia, which can make everyday actions—like putting on clothes—feel unbearable.
This research builds on previous findings from 2011, where Watkins’ lab suggested the CGIC was linked to chronic pain. But until now, scientists couldn’t study this region without damaging it. The new techniques allow for safe and precise control, which could make human treatments possible in the future.
The researchers say they still need to understand what causes the CGIC to start sending chronic pain signals in the first place. But they’re optimistic. In the future, treatments like targeted infusions or brain-machine interfaces might help control pain by working directly on these brain circuits—without the side effects of traditional painkillers.
Ball believes that with new tools allowing for such precise brain control, the search for better pain treatments is advancing faster than ever before.
If you care about pain, please read studies about how to manage your back pain, and Krill oil could improve muscle health in older people.
For more health information, please see recent studies about how to live pain-free with arthritis, and results showing common native American plant may help reduce diarrhea and pain.
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