Scientists can now 'see' pain in our heads.
Pain can only be measured by a description from the person experiencing it.
But now there is a way for doctors to see how much pain someone is in by looking at a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan, or fMRI of their brain.
Researchers from several universities including the University of Colorado in Boulder, New York University, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor have developed an algorithm to quantity how much pain an individual is experiencing.
Study subjects were touched with hot plates at various temperatures from warm to uncomfortably hot in a series of tests both without and with a morphine based painkiller.
The fMRI scans confirmed that the painkillers actually lessen the amount of pain that is registered in the brain.
Tor Wager, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at CU-Boulder and lead author of the paper said: “Right now, there’s no clinically acceptable way to measure pain and other emotions other than to ask a person how they feel. We found a pattern across multiple systems in the brain that is diagnostic of how much pain people feel in response to painful heat.”
