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martyb writes:

At 71, She's Never Felt Pain or Anxiety. Now Scientists Know Why.

She'd been told that childbirth was going to be painful. But as the hours wore on, nothing bothered her — even without an epidural.

"I could feel that my body was changing, but it didn't hurt me," recalled the woman, Jo Cameron, who is now 71. She likened it to "a tickle." Later, she would tell prospective mothers, "Don't worry, it's not as bad as people say it is."

It was only recently — more than four decades later — that she learned her friends were not exaggerating.

Rather, there was something different about the way her body experienced pain: For the most part, it didn't.

Scientists believe they now understand why. In a paper published Thursday in The British Journal of Anaesthesia, researchers attributed Ms. Cameron's virtually pain-free life to a mutation in a previously unidentified gene. The hope, they say, is that the finding could eventually contribute to the development of a novel pain treatment. They believe this mutation may also be connected to why Ms. Cameron has felt little anxiety or fear throughout her life and why her body heals quickly.

"We've never come across a patient like this," said John Wood, the head of the Molecular Nociception Group at University College London.

[...] Dr. Srivastava referred her to University College London's Molecular Nociception Group, a team focused on genetic approaches to understanding the biology of pain and touch. They had some clues for her. In recent decades, scientists have identified dozens of other people who process pain in unusual ways. But when Dr. James Cox, a senior lecturer with that group and another author of the new paper, inspected her genetic profile, it did not resemble that of others known to live without pain.

Eventually he found what he was looking for on a gene the scientists call FAAH-OUT. All of us have this gene. But in Ms. Cameron's, "the patient has a deletion that removes the front of the gene," he said. Additional blood work confirmed this hypothesis, he said.

No pain, no gain?

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