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from the sticks-and-stones-may-break-my-bones-but-nothing-seems-to-hurt-me dept.
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?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 31 2019, @11:39PM (3 children)
Comign up with a better way to dope the populace? Anxiety, fear, pain, these are all natural and useful tools. Turn these off and you create psychopaths.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 01 2019, @02:17AM (2 children)
So was this woman a psychopath? Doesn't sound like it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 01 2019, @11:00PM (1 child)
You wouldn't know from this write-up. In psychopathy (which operates on a spectrum) there is a disconnect with empathy. This sort of malady would create that type of disconnect where pain and anxiety are unrelatable. Tylenol was interestingly found to inhibit emotional pain as well. Depending on the pathways effected by this mutation, and some non-conservative painting by numbers, it's conceivable this would alleviate even emotional pain, further destroying an individual's capacity to empathize.
https://dept.wofford.edu/neuroscience/NeuroSeminar/psfSpring2013/DeWall.pdf [wofford.edu]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 02 2019, @03:08AM
Could != would. We have the actual example of the woman thinking that birthing pain was no big deal, because it was no big deal for her. That might have caused some problems. But that is a far cry from lack of empathy. Of course, the story is too limited to give us an idea of whether she had trouble empathizing or sympathizing with other people.
Depending on the degree of disconnect. But it is worth noting here that empathy is not that laudable an ability precisely because of those sociopaths who can fake emotional pain pretty well. Get too empathic, feeling the emotions that the sociopath is faking, then you become a gullible tool.