Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Pain is among the most primitive and fundamental experiences that any organism can have, yet we lack a basic understanding of how it arises from electrical activity across the brain.Clinically, chronic pain (pain lasting for more than 3 months), has a higher incidence than depression or high blood pressure, yet there are few effective treatments.If we could understand how brain signals give rise to the subjective perception of pain, we may be one step closer to bridging the conceptual divide between objective, physical observations and subjective, inner mental phenomena.More practically, clarifying which brain circuits support chronic pain could facilitate better diagnosis and personalized pain therapies using analgesic brain stimulation.In ongoing human clinical studies, we are developing novel brain-computer interface technology to both study and treat severe pain syndromes in patients' homes.I will discuss our attempts to quantitatively characterize neural signals that track subjective pain states in experimental and clinical settings (e.g., pain biomarkers).Next, I will describe how we integrate these pain biomarkers into algorithms that can adaptively control brain stimulation to treat chronic pain syndromes ondemand.Clinical, chronic pain is not simply a more enduring version of pain after some acute injury, such as breaking a bone.Instead, chronic pain appears to involve pathological changes across the whole brain that perpetuate suffering when pain ceases to be a useful biological signal.Understanding how chronic pain develops over time in the brain and how it varies between people is still a major puzzle.By delivering brain stimulation at the appropriate time to optimal brain targets it may be possible to retrain abnormal brain circuits into a 'healthier' state.
Source: Brain stimulation
Institution: University of California, San Francisco
Language: English
Subfield: Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $4,430
OpenAlex ID: W4407935087