Stress Alleviates Pain?
December 7th, 2007 Posted by: Dr. Cox
(Ivanhoe Newswire) â One way to alleviate pain is extreme stress. For example, if you bang your shin while on a hike, that pain will quickly disappear if you encounter a grizzly bear. This phenomenon is called stress-induces analgesia. New research reveals a better understanding of why this happens in the human body.
Researchers from The Queensland Brain Institute conducted the latest research. They looked at a region of the brain called the amygdala. This is the brainâs emotion-processing region known to mediate the emotional and stress-related aspects of pain. The amygdala is controlled by neurons from the brainstem and is regulated by the stress hormone, noradrenaline.
Study authors say noradrenaline floods the bloodstream during stressful events. They conducted experiments in rats analyzing the effects of noradrenaline on electrical stimulation of the pathway between the brainstem and amygdala. They found that noradrenaline acted as a powerful suppressor of that stimulation. They say that noradrenaline reduced the number of sites that launch a chemical signal to trigger a nerve impulse. Researchers say these results show noradrenaline affects the brainâs pain-processing pathway to produce analgesia.
SOURCE: Neuron, 2007; Dec. 6, 2007