In Europe, about two-thirds of the population suffer from pain at least once a week. Particularly affected: Patients with chronic, i.e. permanent, pain. Here, pain is considered and treated as a disease in its own right instead of a symptom of a disease. A major role was played in several symposia by the realization in recent years that memory-like processes play a major role in pain disorders.
Frequency of pain
According to information from the German Pain League, eight to ten million people in Germany suffer from chronic pain, for example as a result of spinal diseases or bone fractures. Here, pain has lost its warning function.
According to the German Society for the Study of Pain, 250,000 children alone are affected. 25 percent of the elderly suffer from constantly present or recurring pain conditions, which are mostly accepted as fated by those affected or even by doctors.
The pain memory
A so-called pain memory can be developed by the body when pain persists over a long period of time and is left untreated. As a result, the nerve pathways that conduct the pain impulse through the body are constantly irritated, similar to a permanent training effect, with the result that the pain takes on a life of its own. At the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, researchers are studying what happens in the cells when pain occurs.
When one is injured or there is inflammation in the body, nerve cells in the spinal cord send a simple signal to the brain. If the stimulus occurs at regular intervals, the cell reacts more violently each time. Even if the stimulus does not get stronger, it sends signals to the brain non-stop. Prof. Zieglgänsberger of the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry told ARD: “If we repeat this 100 to 200 times, then the cell becomes, as we say, spontaneously active. Then it doesn’t need a pain stimulus at all to keep the cell firing. And that would mean that under certain circumstances in such a situation in the periphery, i.e. in the hand or at the joint, there doesn’t have to be any inflammation at all anymore. And yet it still hurts because that nerve cell is reporting to the brain, there’s still something here.”
Continuous pain even affects the genetic activity of the nerve cell. New protein chains are formed that change the cell membrane so that the nerve cell now reacts more quickly. The result: more pain.
