Manchester researchers embark on major pain study
A team of Manchester researchers are to carry out the first research programme of its kind in the UK to discover which part of the brain deals with the pain of arthritis.
The research could lead to the development of more effective drugs to combat osteoarthritis, a chronic, crippling musculo-skeletal condition which affects more than one million people.
More than 100 people from the Manchester area will take part in the five-year trial, which has been funded by a grant of nearly £800,000 by the Arthritis Research Campaign.
Using a combination of state-of-the-art experimental brain scanning and imaging techniques on three different groups of 40 patients - healthy volunteers, patients with arthritis, and patients with fibromyalgia (also known as chronic pain) - the researchers aim to identify the areas of the brain responsible for generating chronic arthritic pain.
They will compare the experience of patients with osteoarthritis, whose pain is driven by joint destruction, with patients suffering from fibromyalgia, where the pain is thought to be driven by mainly psychological factors. They hope to show how different areas of the brain contribute to the experience of pain.
The team leader Dr Anthony Jones of the Human Pain Research Laboratory at the University of Manchester's Rheumatic Diseases Centre, at Hope Hospital in Salford, said that the work could act as a catalyst and lead to the development of the first new class of drugs of osteoarthritis for many years. "Our work will meet a need for a more rational approach to this very common and costly problem," he added.
"Apart from paracetamol, and the more widespread use of antidepressants for chronic pain, there hasn't been any major developments of new classes of analgesic drugs for arthritic pain since aspirin in the last century. Over the past ten years a network or matrix of structures in the brain that contribute to pain experience has been identified. The challenge now is to provide the kind of information about the function of this pain matrix necessary for new therapies to be targeted."
The pain research group also aim to show the effects of existing pain-relieving drugs, such as morphine, on the brain's pain matrix.
They also plan to investigate how patients manage to distract themselves from pain. Evidence exists that there are two main brain systems involved in pain processing; the medial system, responsible for the emotional, more abstract aspects of pain, and the lateral system, which informs the patient where the pain is located. They believe that people with fibromyalgia have difficulty in switching their attention from the emotional side of their pain, and are therefore less able to develop coping strategies.
