Pain may be stressing brain

CHICAGO, Feb. 11 (UPI) -- Chronic pain keeps areas of the brain active and that may disrupt the brain's equilibrium, a U.S. study suggested.

The study, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, said the brain's state of equilibrium is disrupted when chronic pain causes the frontal cortex -- linked to emotion -- to never "shut up."

"The areas that are affected fail to deactivate when they should" lead study author Dante Chialvo of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine said in a statement.

Being stuck on full throttle, causes neurons to keep firing, Chialvo said.

"We know when neurons fire too much they may change their connections with other neurons and or even die because they can't sustain high activity for so long," he said.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to scan the brains of people with chronic low back pain and the brains of healthy volunteers. The people with pain were, Chialvo said, "using their brain differently than the pain-free group."

Chialvo hypothesized the subsequent changes in brain wiring may make it harder for those with chronic pain to make a decision or be in a good mood to get up in the morning.

Pain may produce depression and other abnormalities, he said, "because it disturbs the balance of the brain as a whole."