According to a new study, researchers can now predict whether a patient has lower back pain by analyzing the brain structure using advanced computer algorithms which has proven to be right 78 percent of the time, reported Medical Xpress.
"People have been looking for an objective pain detector-a 'pain scanner'-for a long time," said Sean Mackey, MD, PhD, chief of the Division of Pain Medicine and professor of anesthesiology, pain and perioperative medicine, and of neurosciences and neurology. "We're still a long way from that, but this method may someday augment self-reporting as the primary way of determining whether a patient is in chronic pain."
Mackey further expressed the utmost importance of such a tool to measure pain instead of self explaining the severity. Most importantly it may be useful for very old patients who have difficulty in communicating.
The study included 47 patients who had lower back pain and 47 healthy ones with an average age of 37 and conducted MRI scans for each to study the structural changes to the brain. The computer algorithm was used to accurately read the brain scan and categorize pain in different set of individuals. The method was successfully able to identify lower back pain 76 percent of the time, according to Medical Xpress.
"Lower back pain is the most common chronic condition we deal with," Mackey said, according to Medical Xpress. "In many cases, we don't understand the cause. What we have learned is that the problem may not be in the back, but in the amplification coming from the back to the brain and nervous system. In this study, we did identify brain regions we think are playing a role in this phenomena."
Former research assistant Hoameng Ung, the first author of the study who is now an MD/PhD student at the University Of Pennsylvania School Of Medicine said comparing these new findings with the previous studies.
"Previous studies have shown that there are functional changes in the brain of a chronic pain patient, and we show that structural changes may be used to differentiate between those with chronic lower back pain and those without," Ung said. "This observation also suggests a role of the central nervous system in chronic pain, and that some types of chronic low back pain may reflect pathology not within the back, but instead within the brain."
These findings are published in an online in Cerebral Cortex.
