Scientists have discovered a kind of "placebo center" in the human brain, stimulation of which may be the key to fighting chronic pain and lead to the abandonment of opioid pain relievers, according to an article published in the journal PLoS Biology.
“Our technology will allow doctors to see the part of the brain that turns on in the patient's brain when pain occurs, and use this data to select a drug to suppress these sensations. In addition, monitoring the activity of the “placebo center” will allow us to evaluate the effectiveness of drugs that relieve a person from pain,”said Vanya Apkaryan from Northwestern University in Chicago (USA).
Apkaryan and his colleagues came to this conclusion by observing the brain function of five dozen people who suffered from chronic knee pain. Scientists offered them to test a new "medicine" for pain, which in half of the cases was not a real pain reliever, duloxetine, but a placebo - a pill-"dummy".
The volunteers took real pain relievers and their false counterparts for three weeks, during which scientists monitored their brain activity using a magnetic resonance imaging scanner. Comparing the activity of different regions of the nervous system, they tried to find out whether the placebo effect differs in its mechanism of action from real painkillers or not.
These observations confirmed that the placebo effect can indeed be used to suppress chronic pain, and showed that there is a special zone in the human brain whose activity predicts how much such dummy pills will act on him.
It is located in the right hemisphere, on one of the folds of the cortex in the front of the brain, and the number of connections of this region with neighboring parts of the cortex, as shown by the experiments of Apkaryan and his colleagues, determine how strongly a person responds to placebo and how different painkillers affect it. work.
For example, scientists have found that in some cases, medications enhance the placebo effect, while in others, analgesics suppressed it and thereby made pain more pronounced. This, according to the authors of the article, may explain why many patients suffering from chronic pain are unable to get rid of it even with the help of very strong pain relievers.