Chronic pain or chronic somatic symptoms are not the same as acute pain or acute somatic symptoms. Chronic symptoms are typically maladaptive and don’t represent a true threat in the body (like an acute tissue injury). Chronic symptoms are more likely to be driven and produced by a learned threat in the brain vs. something […]
This was a nice study showing how having an insecure attachment to a parental figure from childhood becomes a risk factor to having medically unexplained somatic symptoms (MUSS) later in adulthood. The study also highlighted that alexithymia (difficulty in identifying and expressing one’s emotions) mediated the association between anxious attachment and severity of somatic symptoms. The […]
Many people believe the weather has an impact on their pain or arthritis symptoms. This was a great review study looking at exactly that. Titled “Come rain or shine: Is weather a risk factor for musculoskeletal pain?” The authors reviewed data from 11 studies (15,315 participants), providing data on 28,010 events for seven musculoskeletal conditions. […]
There have been many studies linking the role of ACE’s to chronic disease later in life. I wanted to share a 2023 study here that looked to identify a cut-point for the number of ACE’s that would have a significant association with chronic disease later in life. The authors found after looking at data in […]
One of the areas in chronic pain that’s not as talked about is the role of identifying emotions and how the lack of knowing what you are feeling emotionally may emerge physically as somatic symptoms. Difficulty in identifying the emotions you are feeling is called alexithymia. Alexithymia has been implicated in multiple studies to have […]
This 2023 review study found an association between anxiety and autoimmune disorders. In fact what the meta-analysis found was that individuals experiencing anxiety were 1.28 times more likely to develop autoimmune diseases compared to those without anxiety. The researchers looked at data from 16 studies involving over 1.4 million participants. They state directly that the […]
Mind over matter? I found these two studies linked here very interesting as they show the power of the mind alone in affecting our health. I will talk about these in a moment. First I find it fascinating that many of us still think the mind is somehow separated from the body. I jokingly ask […]
When I think of the brain’s role in somatic symptoms, I think of three main outputs the brain can produce that will affect symptoms: 1) thoughts 2) emotions, and 3) behaviors. The brain is continually picking up input from our environment through our senses (taste, touch, smell, sight, sound, etc.) by perceiving what’s happening in […]
I want to review this new study that came out recently (May 2024) in the Clinical Journal of Pain. The results showed how we deal with emotions in real time can have an immediate effect on our pain experience. What the study found was that maladaptive emotion regulation (ER) strategies were associated with more pain […]
Let’s look at a new 2024 research paper that reviewed and looked at the neuroscience data on the role of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) in chronic pain. The authors “suggest an updated model of what both the altered activity in and functional connectivity to the dorsal vmPFC may represent in people with chronic pain. […]
