Chronic pain: a new discovery validates sufferers’ complaints

People who suffer from chronic pain are often not taken seriously by health care providers. That’s because medical people can’t find an injury or other source of the pain. Recent discoveries have found a hard-science explanation for the pain: glial cells have run amok. Glia are scattered throughout the nervous system and take up nearly half its space. Scientists have determined that glia play a role in supporting neurons, cleaning up their waste and helping them communicate. Now, they have discovered that, instead of just supporting and responding to neuronal activity, glia often direct it. With chronic pain, glia send false and destructive pain signals that never end. In such cases, pain is not just a symptom of something gone wrong, it becomes its own disease.

Sensation of pain works in three stages. First, pain-sensitive neurons send a message to your spinal cord that triggers a reflex—say jerking your hand back from a hot surface. Next, the signal is handed off to neurons in the spinal cord (stage two), which then take the message to your brain (stage three). It’s at stage two—the handoff in the spinal cord—that things can go wrong. At this stage, a profusion of glia regulate the pain signals by amplifying or decreasing their intensity or duration. Chronic pain develops because the glia accelerate the pain system into an endless inflammatory loop that provokes the nerves into generating a perpetual pain alarm, generated in the brain.

Scientists don’t know how or why glial mismanagement develops. It can emerge after an injury or out of nowhere. Apparently, even after an injury has healed, pain signals can spread to other areas, causing more pain. (They can transmit information through dozens of communication pathways.) So far, solutions to this terrible condition have not been found. You can’t knock glia out, and current painkillers don’t help because they target neurons, not glia. Plus glia have a built-in redundancy. Even if a treatment blocks one pain signal, glia promptly find another.

At least sufferers of chronic pain now have validation that their suffering is real.

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