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from the better-living-through-chemistry dept.
Brain Protein Promotes Maintenance of Chronic Pain:
A protein called RGS4 (Regulator of G protein signaling 4) plays a prominent role in the maintenance of long-term pain states and may serve as a promising new target for the treatment of chronic pain conditions, according to research conducted at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and published in print October 16, in The Journal of Neuroscience.
The discovery may help doctors stop acute pain from progressing into chronic pain, a condition in which patients experience not just pain, but a number of debilitating symptoms ranging from sensory deficits to depression and loss of motivation. The transition from acute to chronic (pathological) pain is accompanied by numerous adaptations in immune, glial, and neuronal cells, many of which are still not well understood. As a result, currently available medications for neuropathic or chronic inflammatory pain show limited efficacy and major side effects. Commonly administered opioids provide temporary alleviation of some pain symptoms, but carry serious risks like addiction in the context of long-term treatment for chronic pain. Therefore, there is an imminent need for novel approaches towards the treatment of chronic pain and for the development of medications that disrupt pain states instead of simply alleviating symptoms.
"Our research reveals that RGS4 actions contribute to the transition from acute and sub-acute pain to pathological pain states and to the maintenance of pain," says Venetia Zachariou, PhD, Professor in the Nash Family Department of Neuroscience, the Department of Pharmacological Sciences and The Friedman Brain Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. "Because chronic pain states affect numerous neurochemical processes and single-target drugs are unlikely to work, it's exciting to have discovered a multifunctional protein that can be targeted to disrupt the maintenance of pain."
Journal Reference:
Kleopatra Avrampou, et al.. RGS4 maintains chronic pain symptoms in rodent models. The Journal of Neuroscience, 2019; 3154-18 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3154-18.2019
What possible survival benefit can there be for having a pathway to actively maintain chronic pain?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Sunday October 13 2019, @02:58AM
There has always been a solution to pain on earth, it is called the poppy plant, and the united states government and associated mucky mucks have a near total monopoly on its production, but same entity declares it completely illegal and covertly traffics the raw material because it turns out the cure for pain has an even better markup % than oil.
As to the question of the evolutionary purpose to a pain signal not deactivating, I think in evolution things that cause beings to be more cautious probably have an evolutionary basis, and my chronic pain totally reminds me to avoid anything resembling a football game or hand to hand combat.
I think also turning things on in the body is easier than turning them off. Meditation has helped with chronic pain, and time in general. I have seen in my life how I can get my body to turn off at least some kinds of inflammation.
These people, like they have been doing for a while, are looking for a way to deactivate pain without giving any kind of pleasure and I find this pursuit insane and puritanical.
What they want is a way to get people to grind themselves down to the bone working for other people's capital accumulation without noticing that their body is being destroyed and then eventually they will be discarded once they are ground down, after which time they will neither be able to work or afford fancy drugs to make backbreaking work feel like it is not backbreaking work.
With dire implications for that one horse on the farm who just likes to work for the sake of his quality ethic and being a bro, thinking he's one day going to get to retire and enjoy some of the good life, when the second he stops working for whatever reason, he becomes totally useless to predatory capitalism and/or whatever totalitarian flavor.
In the case of a writer/etc like me, by the time my fingers wear out all of my ideas will have been scraped off of the wires and the best parts simply incorporated and bastardized into the 'work' of those the cultural hegemony approves of after which point my fingers will be too broke to even think about writing up a legal prior art complaint. And getting the cia's entertainment lawyer to admit they got the plot for avengers 10 from your email will be a real trick.
Oh how I hate living in a world run by garbage people.
thesesystemsarefailing.net