Chronic Pain Leads to Mood Disorders

Chronic Pain Leads to Concomitant Noradrenergic Impairment and Mood Disorders

This article essentially states that the depression and anxiety that go along with chronic pain aren’t the cause of the pain, but its result.  Pain patients have often have to fight doctors who insist the pain is “psychogenic” due to their depression and anxiety, but this study shows that pain is the initiator of these psychological symptoms.

We need more research like this to defend ourselves against the new DSM V psychiatric diagnosis of “Psychogenic Pain” or “Somatic Symptom Disorder”, a giant leap backward to the time of Freud.  This seems strange, since research in neuroscience has proven that pain is a quantifiable chemical and electrical phenomenon in the body and brain.  Luckily, we may soon be able to prove “invisible” (or not yet diagnosed) pain is real using the latest imaging technologies, which are creating pictures of pain activity in various brain centers

Patients suffering chronic pain are at high risk of suffering long-lasting emotional disturbances characterized by persistent low mood and anxiety. We propose that this might be the result of a functional impairment in noradrenergic circuits associated with locus coeruleus (LC) and prefrontal cortex, where emotional and sensorial pain processes overlap.

long-term neuropathic pain (28 days after injury) resulted in an inability to cope with stressful situations, provoking depressive and anxiogenic-like behaviors, even more intense than the aversiveness associated with pain perception. The onset of these behavioral changes coincided with irruption of noradrenergic dysfunction

Long-term neuropathic pain leads to anxio-depressive-like behaviors that are more predominant than the aversion of a painful experience. These changes are consistent with the impairment of noradrenergic system described in depressive disorders.