IRP study explains why opioid therapy may not always work well for chronic pain

Thursday, May 24, 2018

Researchers have shown that pain-induced changes in the rat brain’s opioid receptor system may explain the limited effectiveness of opioid therapy in chronic pain and may play a role in the depression that often accompanies it. These findings clearly show the impact of chronic pain on the brain and its relation to depression. The study, conducted by scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and colleagues from McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, was published in the journal Pain.

“We know that people with chronic pain have reduced availability of opioid receptors — the molecules opioid drugs bind to — in the brain,” said Mark Pitcher, Ph.D., visiting fellow in the Division of Intramural Research at the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) and one of the authors of the study. “What we haven’t known ― until now ― is why. Are there preexisting brain differences that might predispose some people to develop chronic pain? Or might chronic pain cause these differences? Our findings suggest that chronic pain itself is responsible.”

In the study, cross-sectional positron emission tomography (PET) imaging was performed on the brains of 17 rats that had undergone surgery to produce a nerve injury that causes chronic pain and on 17 rats that had undergone sham surgery (a similar procedure that does not cause chronic pain). Three months later, the availability of opioid receptors had decreased in multiple regions of the brain in the nerve-injured rats, but no changes had occurred in the sham-surgery rats.