Pain is an unpleasant experience that involves both physical and psychological components. Feeling pain is quite adaptive because it makes us aware of an injury, and it motivates us to remove ourselves from the cause of that injury. In addition, pain also makes us less likely to suffer additional injury because we will be gentler with our injured body parts. Generally speaking, pain can be considered to be neuropathic or inflammatory in nature.
Pain that signals some type of tissue damage is known as inflammatory pain. In some situations, pain results from damage to neurons of either the peripheral or central nervous system.
As a result, pain signals that are sent to the brain get exaggerated. This type of pain is known as neuropathic pain. Multiple treatment options for pain relief range from relaxation therapy to the use of analgesic medications to deep brain stimulation.
Some individuals are born without the ability to feel pain. This very rare genetic disorder is known as congenital insensitivity to pain or congenital analgesia. While those with congenital analgesia can detect differences in temperature and pressure, they cannot experience pain. As a result, they often suffer significant injuries. Young children have serious mouth and tongue injuries because they have bitten themselves repeatedly. Not surprisingly, individuals suffering from this disorder have much shorter life expectancies due to their injuries and secondary infections of injured sites U.
National Library of Medicine, Watch this video to learn more about congenital insensitivity to pain. When you step on a pin, this activates a host of mechanoreceptors, many of which are nociceptors. You may have noticed that the sensation changes over time.
First you feel a sharp stab that propels you to remove your foot, and only then you feel a wave of more aching pain. The sharp stab is signaled via fast-conducting A-fibers, which project to the somatosensory cortex. This part of the cortex is somatotopically organized—that is, the sensory signals are represented according to where in the body they stem from see homunculus illustration, Figure 2. This distinction corresponds, at least partly, to how this information travels from the peripheral to the central nervous system and how it is processed in the brain Price, Figure 2a.
As you can see, the lips, hands, feet and genitals send more somatosensory projections to the brain than do any other body parts. Figure 2b. In sudden strong pain like that generated by pricking your finger, a reflex response occurs within the spinal cord. Motor neurones are activated and the muscles of your arm contract, moving your hand away from the sharp object.
This occurs in a fraction of a second — before the signal has been relayed on to the brain — so you will have pulled your arm away before even becoming conscious of the pain. Sharp, pricking pain is carried by A-delta fibres while dull throbbing pain travels via C fibres. A-delta fibres conduct signals faster than C fibres as they are larger and are coated in myelin, which acts an electrical insulator. There are several points in the pain pathway where the signal can be modified.
One is the dorsal horn of the spinal cord. This is the basis of the gate control theory of pain described below. When we feel pain, such as when we touch a hot stove, sensory receptors in our skin send a message via nerve fibres A-delta fibres and C fibres to the spinal cord and brainstem and then onto the brain where the sensation of pain is registered, the information is processed and the pain is perceived. The gate theory says that as these pain messages come into the spinal cord and the central nervous system before they even get to the brain , they can be amplified, turned down or even blocked out.
This has to do with the brain being busy doing other things and shutting the gate until it can pay attention to the messages. Large diameter nerve fibres A-beta fibres responsible for transmitting signals of touch to the brain have the ability to close the pain gate and so block signals from other smaller diameter nerve fibres which transmit pain.
An example of this would be when a child falls over and hurts her knee — if she rubs her knee, the signal from that sensation of touch temporarily blocks the pain signal travelling from the injured knee to the brain. What affects your experience of pain? Severe pain quickly gets your attention and usually produces a stronger physical response than mild pain. The location of your pain can also affect how you perceive it. For example, pain coming from the head is harder to ignore than pain originating elsewhere in the body.
The location of pain in your body does not always indicate where it is coming from. For example, the pain from a heart attack can be felt in the neck, jaws, arms or abdomen.
This is known as referred pain and occurs because signals from different parts of the body often converge on the same neurones in the spinal cord. The gate control theory helps explain how the brain influences your experience of pain. It seems that several factors can affect how you interpret pain:. This is the type of pain illustrated in the first diagram. Nociceptive pain is caused by any injury to body tissues, for example, a cut, burn or fracture broken bone.
Postoperative pain and cancer pain are other forms of nociceptive pain. This type of pain can be aching, sharp or throbbing. Nociceptive pain can be constant or intermittent and may be worsened by movement or by coughing, depending on the area it originates from. This is caused by abnormalities in the system that carries and interprets pain — the problem may be in the nerves, spinal cord or brain.
Neuropathic pain is felt as a burning, tingling, shooting or electric sensation. These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data. We and our partners process data to: Actively scan device characteristics for identification.
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