Reducing Abdominal Pain Without Using Painkillers

Oct, 2022 - By WMR

Medical science is very interested in learning how the brain and the abdominal organs communicate via nerves, and recent studies have started to indicate that this relationship is important for both health and disease.

According to recent study from Flinders University, it is possible to quiet pain responses by surgically eliminating certain populations of sensory nerves that connect the brain and internal organs like the bladder and intestines. Despite the fact that persistent visceral discomfort affects a large number of people, there are few effective treatments for it.

Visceral pain, which affects our internal organs, differs from the pain that we experience when humans strain a muscle , for example, and is a response to a variety of illnesses, including abdominal malignancies, irritable bowel syndrome, inflammation, bladder cystitis and endometriosis. Lack of methods to pinpoint certain sensory neuron groups specifically sense pain from the gut wall, however, has prevented researchers from pinpointing the sensory nerve channel that transmit pain signals from the gut to the brain. According to the study team, the described technique offers a crucial avenue for scientific research and sheds light on the precise path pain impulses take within the body.

The new study expected to show that this strategy works in human due to the similarity in sensory processing and pain signalling between other species. While this method has not been tested on people, a similar technology is already employed in humans to prevent pain signals from entering the brain. The new research represents yet another important step in the understanding of the way the stomach and brain interact and the crucial role this plays in a variety of disease problems.