Pain: The Most Common Complications Of Pain And Nociception

Pain is an unpleasant feeling that is a vital component of the body’s defense system. It provides warning to the nervous system to initiate a motor response to minimize physical harm. Physiologists distinguish between pain and nociception; nociception refers to signals arriving in the central nervous system resulting from activation of specialized sensory receptors called nociceptors that provide information about tissue damage. Pain is the unpleasant emotional experience that usually accompanies nociception (Fein, 2012).

Understanding pain starts by first defining the most basic aspect of pain: acute pain versus chronic pain. One of the main jobs of the nervous system is to sense and interpret a variety of stimuli, including thermal, mechanical, environmental, and chemical irritants. These stimuli can generate acute pain, and in the setting of persistent injury, both peripheral and central nervous system components of the pain communication pathway display plasticity, enhancing pain signals and producing hypersensitivity (Basbaum, et al., 2009). It is beneficial when plasticity enables protective reflexes, but when the changes are continuous, chronic pain can occur.

There is a strong linkage between acute pain and emotion. Feeling pain commonly leads to negative emotions but negative feelings can also increase or even cause physical pain. There are two separate forebrain networks for acute pain and emotion and the cingulate cortex is involved in both.

Pain is the most common reason for physician consultation in the United States (Atlas, et al., 2011). Neuropathic pain it is a very popular topic of research because there is no clinical management for it. Neuropathic pain is defined as pain initiated or caused by a primary lesio...

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...sion of, and reaction to pain are influenced by genetic, developmental, familial, psychological, social and cultural variables (McGrath, 1994). The understanding of pain requires not only understanding of the nociceptive system, but recognition and control of the many environmental and psychological factors that modify human pain perceptions.

The ongoing identification of molecules and genes that mark specific neuronal cell types (both peripheral and central) provides essential tools with which to manipulate genetically or pharmacologically these neurons and to link their activities to specific components of pain behavior under normal and pathophysiological circumstances (Cervero, 2012). This process should bring us closer to understanding how acute pain gives way to the maladaptive changes that produce chronic pain, and how this switch can be prevented or reversed.