The suffering of people with chronic back pain can be made worse by the behaviour of their partners, suggests new research.
快猫短视频s compared the experiences of patients whose partner was 鈥渟olicitous鈥�, dwelling on the problem and being involved with the pain, with those whose spouse tried to distract the patient from their suffering.
Those patients with partners who habitually focused on the pain showed almost a three-fold increased sensitivity to an electrical shock to the back compared with distracting partners.
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The effect was only observed when the partners were present. But the researchers also measured brain activity with electroencephalography (EEG) and found a corresponding increase in the physiological response to pain 鈥� showing the effect was not simply psychological.
Herta Flor, from the University of Heidelberg, presented her team鈥檚 work on Sunday at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Orlando, Florida, US. 鈥淭his is an interesting example showing how social factors can influence pain intensity, pain behaviours and even the physiological processes of pain鈥�. This is not something under conscious control, she points out.
Learning process
She believes the mechanism is like a learning process. Animal research has shown that if behaviour is rewarded then it will increase, so a partner who reinforces the experience can make pain worse, she argues.
But Frances Abbott, a pain researcher from McGill University, Montreal, Canada, and a sufferer of chronic pain herself says many such people find the support of a spouse very important: 鈥淚 find it very difficult to connect with these kinds of data.鈥� It may be the precise behaviour of the spouse that is the key, suggests Allan Basbaum of the University of California at San Francisco: 鈥淪upport can be very different from concern and worry.鈥�
Flor says that now they know behaviour can alter the brain鈥檚 response to pain, they would like to try to reverse the process. Perhaps patients can learn to change the sensation of pain, she suggests. 鈥淲e have started to measure this brain response and feed it back to the patient to see if they can alter the response in a particular brain region,鈥� she says.