MEASURING CHRONIC PAIN

Relieving pain is a priority of health care, so it’s perhaps surprising that pain assessment is such an inexact science—a patient’s pain is usually self-reported on a scale of one to ten. Now several teams of researchers are attempting to develop more objective measuring methods. The studies are looking at a wide variety of sources of pain and ways to track them. A group of Australian scientists discovered that immune cells associated with chronic pain (which is usually related to an underlying condition such as arthritis) have a different natural color from cells in acute pain (usually the result of an injury) or no pain. They developed a blood test that “reads” the color of cells instantly, which might one day allow doctors to determine the severity of pain and tailor treatment accordingly. Another blood test, developed by Indiana University School of Medicine researchers, not only measures pain severity but also helps match biomarkers in a patient’s blood with potential medications. “The biomarker is like a fingerprint,” explains study coauthor Alexander Niculescu, MD, PHD, “and we match it against [a prescription] database and see which compound would normalize the signature. We found some compounds [including SC-560, a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug, and pyridoxine, which is vitamin B6] that have been used for decades to treat other things pair the best with the biomarkers.”