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Published online 15 November 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.1084
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Why pain sometimes lingers
Animals have nerves that can make a soft caress painful.
A once-mysterious neural pathway may have a crucial role in making injured areas overly sensitive to touch, a study in mice suggests.
When a person has any kind of injury — a broken shin, for example, or a sunburn — the pain system becomes hypersensitized, firing up in response to normally painless sensations induced by, for instance, walking or a gentle massage.
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Might the function of these fibres explain pain in conditions such as Fibromyalgia syndrome with its odd, consistent pain points?
I would not hold much hope for any clinical consequences from this research. As a long term sufferer of chronic back pain , I dedicated a large chunk of time reading the scientific literature in the field. Personally, I believe that there been a consistent failure to deliver in this field and it is not just a problem in translating basic research into clinical/pharmaceutical applications. News pieces like this come out every year or so on the occasion of the discovery of another pain "circuit" (an absurd concept due to the pain system complexity) or whatever from the same 5-10 groups, a million mice must have been killed in studies that have found reduced/increased hyperalgia or allodynia due to some up-regulation of this or that ion channel, BDNF , etc etc and in the end of all this not one new clinically effective solution for persistent pain sufferers. There must be a better way.