Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Medicine Biotech

Brain Waves Can Tell Us How Much Pain Someone Is In 70

Posted by BeauHD from the better-treatment-methods-incoming dept.
A study published in Nature Neuroscience suggests that brain signals can be used to detect the severity of chronic pain, potentially leading to the development of personalized therapies for individuals suffering from severe pain conditions. MIT Technology Review reports: Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, implanted electrodes in the brains of four people with chronic pain. The patients then answered surveys about the severity of their pain multiple times a day over a period of three to six months. After they finished filling out each survey, they sat quietly for 30 seconds so the electrodes could record their brain activity. This helped the researchers identify biomarkers of chronic pain in the brain signal patterns, which were as unique to the individual as a fingerprint. Next, the researchers used machine learning to model the results of the surveys. They found they could successfully predict how the patients would score the severity of their pain by examining their brain activity, says Prasad Shirvalkar, one of the study's authors.

"The hope is that now that we know where these signals live, and now that we know what type of signals to look for, we could actually try to track them noninvasively," he says. "As we recruit more patients, or better characterize how these signals vary between people, maybe we can use it for diagnosis." The researchers also found they were able to distinguish a patient's chronic pain from acute pain deliberately inflicted using a thermal probe. The chronic-pain signals came from a different part of the brain, suggesting that it's not just a prolonged version of acute pain, but something else entirely.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Brain Waves Can Tell Us How Much Pain Someone Is In More

Brain Waves Can Tell Us How Much Pain Someone Is In

Comments Filter:
  • Brain waves
    Mercy craves
    Lathered staves
    Profile saves
    Burma Shave(s)

  • You pumped the inverse wave back into the skull via electrodes?

    Will it neutralize the pain?

    • The patient will feel no pain anymore instantly.

    • If you believe in homeopathy, sure. You just have to lower the amplitude to a fraction and shake the patient.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dareth ( 47614 )
      That makes me want to go dig out WinAmp again.

  • Emotional Pain (Score:3)

    by NobleNobbler ( 9626406 ) on Tuesday May 23, 2023 @09:40PM (#63546977)

    I wonder if it bears a striking resemblance in waveform

    • Probably. Heroin junkies, for the most part, are not in physical pain, but the same pain meds give them relief.

    • Re:Emotional Pain (Score:5, Interesting)

      by MacMann ( 7518492 ) on Wednesday May 24, 2023 @02:42AM (#63547221)

      I recall reading about other studies that shows little distinction on the source of pain.

      The US Army had problems with drug abuse during the Vietnam war, abuse that didn't always continue after soldiers returned. Studies showed that the drugs were to relieve emotional pain, and acted on the body like any pain from physical injury. Those that came home and were able to readjust didn't continue their drug abuse. Those that came home to difficulties still had the emotional pain that lead to seeking drugs for relief. This lead to changes in how soldiers were returned from deployment. The biggest change is that soldiers were kept on a stateside base for weeks to months to make sure they had adjusted well. Some of this would be idle convalescent time but also could be time for training. Soldiers could then be observed for any health problems, physical or mental, and get treatment before separation or redeployment.

    • Almost certainly [nih.gov].

  • Super great (Score:3)

    by cfalcon ( 779563 ) on Tuesday May 23, 2023 @09:42PM (#63546979)

    More knowledge used by torturers in the dark future, and no one else. Like those cartel guys that burn their victim alive and use doctors to keep them alive as long as possible.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The government will start testing people applying for disability benefits to see if they are really in too much pain to work.

      You will be able to buy headphones that also measure your pain levels and automatically dose you with Ibuprofen. Your boss will require them, and only when they are unable to dampen the pain can you take a sick day.

  • Now doctors can't turn people away, as easily (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lunati Senpai ( 10167723 ) on Tuesday May 23, 2023 @10:49PM (#63547039)

    One bonus, if this becomes a thing, is we can actually get doctors to have to acknowledge when people are in pain.

    With current drug laws in much of the world, especially for those in the United States, doctors tend to deny anyone who says they are in pain, and give alternative treatments that do nothing to actually affect pain.

    Now we can prove that no, this person is not a junkie, and is in pain.

    And maybe we'll finally get proper acknowledgement of period cramps, instead of getting idiots saying it's all in your head.

    • One bonus, if this becomes a thing, is we can actually get doctors to have to acknowledge when people are in pain.

      Indeed. As someone dealing with chronic pain I was left wondering why physicians kept trying to shove antidepressants down my throat. They did nothing for my pain and left me with some very unpleasant side effects. I found out with some research that supposedly antidepressants help relieve "nerve pain". Well, I keep telling the physicians that they don't help, and that I want the medications I had before, the kinds of drugs approved by the FDA for pain. I was told I would not get those medications. Wh

      • It appears my prescriptions are written by politicians now. Physicians don't create policy, politicians do.

        I think you should blame the people who got rich suing opioid producers and extracting $21 billion from them. In the US the public largely gets what it wants, although people don't feel like it because so many want to have their cake and eat it too.

        • I think you should blame the people who got rich suing opioid producers and extracting $21 billion from them.

          I think you should blame the executives of the producers, which deliberately underreported and downplayed risks of their medications. They made the decision to lie about their product.

          • Sure, in much the same way that nutritional information labels have prevented the US from having an epidemic of obesity.
    • Then you find a bunch of people who are in severe pain, but this new scan says they're not, and they're extra special quadruple fucked, never getting a pain killer ever again except maybe a few hours after a major surgery because their file will now say 'drug seeking behavior'.
      That's how it's worked with back injuries. Not all injuries show on an MRI, and if your MRI didn't have the magic phrase 'recommend clinical correlation', no painkillers, byebye.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by La Gris ( 531858 )

      The problem is that pain has no colour. Pain from drug dependence, lack or withdrawal is indistinguishable from other chronic pain sources.

      Pain is a message from the body to the brain, that something is wrong.

      It can be damage, damage can be observed.
      It can be functional (dysfunctional actually), some is observable, some much less. In case of drug addiction the dysfunction alone is a symptom, not the cause. ...

      Pain is a very complex matter. Perception is different across individuals. Some persons are more re

  • Wide implications. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Healer_LFG ( 10260770 ) on Tuesday May 23, 2023 @10:49PM (#63547041)
    During my time as a licensed healthcare professional, an oft repeated phrase was "you can't deny pain", meaning if a patient reports having pain, then there is no good way to prove that they aren't in pain. This led to pain management and surgeries. This is good if they successfully treat the conditions, but statistically, some of those were extraneous due to patients self-reporting pain higher than they actually experienced. On the one hand, being able to accurately identify if a patient is experiencing pain is good for the field in general. As the artical states, you can fine-tune a treatment plan without over-medicating a patient, as well as root out malingerers. But on the other hand, pain is still subjective. On a scale of one-to-ten, a specific individual's "3" might be another individual's "9". Furthermore, who gets to say what "level of pain" qualifies for what treatments? If you live in the USA, that liberty will likely be awarded to your insurance provider. You can be damn sure they're going to be quite restrictive for that to pinch their own pennies.
    • I always thought the 10 was the give away indicator. If you can verbalize a 10 you aren’t experiencing a 10.

      • I always thought the 10 was the give away indicator. If you can verbalize a 10 you aren’t experiencing a 10.

        You're probably right. Your comment reminds me of a study I saw once where they were trying to detect people who were under-reporting depression in post-partum women. What they found was that if the women scored a zero on screening tools for depression-- that they reported *no* depressive symptoms whatsoever-- this was a strong predictor that they were actually pretty depressed. (How did they determine that they were "actually pretty depressed"? I don't remember, but there was some outcome measure that

      • Most people have never had enough experience with severe pain to accurately self-report. I would certainly overrate any sort of severe pain because I don't have much to compare with.

    • I get so frustrated with the questions on giving a number for pain level that I'll often refuse to answer. They write the number down and then do nothing about it. I should bring a 10-sided die and roll it in front of them to pick a number as an attempt to illustrate what I believe the utility in their number scheme appears to be.

      My pain cannot be reduced to a number. If it were that simple then perhaps the treatment would also be that simple. I give a number then the nurse pulls a pill bottle with the

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by arQon ( 447508 )

        It appears from drug policy in the USA that the government prefers people dead than high.

        Very much so.

        They will put so much Tylenol with codeine, the stuff my dentist prescribed after a root canal, that someone would die of liver damage from the Tylenol before they'd get high from the codeine.

        You know what the funny part is? The whole "adding acetaminophen" tragedy came from *one* idiot, and is based on literally *nothing* except his own imagination. No testing, no studies run, nothing: just utter bullshit pulled out of thin air, and discredited over and over again for decades since. Norco/Vicodin still does it to this day though, and it's impossible to get hydrocodone in any form without at least 30x as much liver-destroying poison added to the pills as there is actual medicine.

        I guess the Tylenol content was dialed back a few years ago, because that was making the Tylenol brand look bad from the overdoses.

        Yep

    • Pain is extremely subjective, even for the patient. Getting an acute gastric perforation gives you an unimaginable amount of pain, but if you don't change posture and wait for 10 minutes it will subside. And yes, waiting is what you do in the waiting room of the ER. It is really amazing how much the human body gets used to pain and suppresses it.

  • This could impact a lot of ethical issues (Score:4, Interesting)

    by physicsphairy ( 720718 ) on Wednesday May 24, 2023 @12:06AM (#63547089)

    Being able to see how the brain is processing stimuli as painful or not has the potential to strongly alter society's take on methods of execution/euthanasia, including for animals, and late term abortion. All those scenarios where you asserted something was done humanely but couldn't actually ask the subject about the experience after the fact.

    • Speaking of humane, a lot of people are denied pain medication because it's assumed they're faking it to get drugs...

    • If people cared about humane execution, they would all be done with pure nitrogen. I feel like the people fighting to keep lethal injection know that a chemically paralyzed person is suffering horribly but shows no outward signs.

  • Use on animals (Score:3)

    by Waccoon ( 1186667 ) on Wednesday May 24, 2023 @12:22AM (#63547105)

    I think an evolution of this tech would be fantastic for pet owners and vets. It can be hard to tell when animals are in pain.

  • What a time to live in (Score:3)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Wednesday May 24, 2023 @03:36AM (#63547271)

    I can't give you anything for your pain because anything that works is Schedule 1 now, but I can tell you just exactly how much pain you're in on a calibrated scale.

    • I can't give you anything for your pain because anything that works is Schedule 1 now, but I can tell you just exactly how much pain you're in on a calibrated scale.

      That reminds me of one time going to see someone about a really bad flu/cold/whatever and being told to pick up something at the drug store. I don't remember the exact name, only that it had varieties that ended with different letters. I was looking for the "D" (or whatever) variety, but all I could find was "DM", "V", "R", and "T" (just picking letters at random). I guessed that the "D" and "DM" must be somehow related, or the provider was somehow mistaken on the name. I bought it, went home, and took

      • Re:What a time to live in (Score:4, Interesting)

        by fafalone ( 633739 ) on Wednesday May 24, 2023 @05:28AM (#63547381)
        That kind of bullshit will only increase. The DEA/FDA are still making noises about giving loperamide (Immodium) the pseudoephedrine treatment, or possibly making it prescription only.
        Why?
        Well, it's technically an opioid. But it doesn't cross the blood-brain-barrier, so doesn't get you high. Normally. If you take an obnoxious quantity, like 50-100 2mg pills,and have no tolerance, you can overwhelm the mechanism that keeps it out. Virtually nobody does this. What people *do* use it for, if you take 20-60 pills, it will stop opioid withdrawal. Not just the diarrhea, all of it.
        You'd think the government would be happy about a cheap way to stop opioid withdrawal that isn't typically abused, but nope. They have to assert their control, get their fucking cut, and lock it down. The excuse? A very, very small number of people have both tolerance and try to get high from it... if you take 300+ pills at once, or 200-400 pills per day for weeks-months, there's a small risk of death from prolonged QT heart failure. So small the number of documented deaths, ever, can be counted on your fingers. And again, only in people who are taking *hundreds* of pills at once. Not an accident.

        But the FDA/DEA claims it's just so risky they have to heavily lock it down... so get ready. They've already banned bottles; notice how you can only get small quantities in blister packs now, when a few years ago you could get bottles by hundreds?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jbengt ( 874751 )
          I don't know about loperamide, but the reason that pseudoephedrine is locked up is because black market chemists were buying (and stealing) large quantities and using it to make meth.

          • So fucking what?

            Seriously, so fucking what? If people want to get high, let them get high. But people who need medication still can get it, that's worth more than some dopeheads not getting high.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by kackle ( 910159 )
              He said it right in his response: people were stealing it; that's why. And "locked up" only means you have to ask for it instead of it being out on the shelf.

              I'd be pro-legalizing drugs if the users didn't require taxpayer-funded rehabilitation again and again.
              • Taxpayer funded rehab is cheaper than taxpayer funded prison, taxpayer funded massive LE apparatus, and legalization would reduce ODs, lessening taxpayer funded medical expenses, and taxpayer funded drugs would save far more than that in property crime loses averted. It's been studied in quite some detail. You want the least amount of burden as a non-using, taxpaying citizen? You should support legalization.
                But I doubt this is news to you. People who make arguments like yours aren't looking to save taxpaye

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by kackle ( 910159 )
                  The opioid crisis demonstrated that people can't handle their drugs. Then their many problems would perpetually spill into other's lives--I have first hand experience. I'm not okay with that on a national scale. You say it's been "studied", but it's not been widely done, so it's just their guesses.

  • This would be a fantastic breakthrough (Score:4, Insightful)

    by RecycledElectrons ( 695206 ) on Wednesday May 24, 2023 @07:20AM (#63547493)

    Right now, we have no way to calibrate how much pain someone is in, except to show them cartoon faces and to ask them for an answer on a scale of 1 to 10.

    If we could see how much pain someone is really in with a test, it would help us give the right pain medications to the right patients - avoiding much opioid abuse and avoiding leaving people in pain.

    If we could see how much pain someone is really in with a test, it would help the courts stop scammers who sue over minor traffic accidents and help the courts give appropriate awards to those who are really in pain.

    If we could see how much pain someone is really in with a test, it would help us decide who needs disability and who needs to get back to work.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by arQon ( 447508 )

      Right now, we have no way to calibrate how much pain someone is in, except to show them cartoon faces and to ask them for an answer on a scale of 1 to 10.

      Yes we do: it's called the McGill scale. VAS (which is what you're talking about) is a garbage system only really appropriate for simple injuries, not chronic pain.

      > If we could see how much pain someone is really in with a test, it would

      not make any difference at all. The frauds would still commit fraud, and the same corrupt doctors who falsified their "whiplash" cases would claim the pain is variable and they were just tested during a low point. The drug-seekers would likewise still lie about their pai

  • A new excuse to deny opiates to people in pain. You're just plain SOL if you don't happen to be one of the ones with the right brain waves.

Slashdot Top Deals

Understanding is always the understanding of a smaller problem in relation to a bigger problem. -- P.D. Ouspensky

Close