People with chronic back pain may be losing the 'thinking' part of their brains, new research suggests. A small study presented recently at the American Pain Society in Chicago finds that people suffering from long-term back pain have less gray matter than those without such chronic pain. The brain has two types of tissue, white matter that holds the brain together and gray matter that contains "thinking cells."
Head researcher A. Vania Apkarian, Ph.D., an associate professor at Northwestern University in Chicago, studied the brains of 10 people with chronic back pain and compared the results with 20 people without such pain. Not only do sufferers have less gray matter overall but the matter was less dense than pain-free subjects. He also found that certain parts of the brain were more affected than others; the part involved in emotional decision-making and social behavior, for example, lost the greatest amount of gray matter.
