Partners inflame pain

Spouses' sympathy hurts while newborn trauma numbs.
04 November 2002

HELEN PEARSON

Partners should suggest a walk instead of offering sympathy © Getty Images

Neuroscientists have confirmed what down-trodden spouses long suspected: partners can be a pain. A sympathetic other half can exacerbate backache, they revealed this weekend. Pain as a baby, meanwhile, may dull aches in later life.

Coddled chronic back-pain sufferers experience three times the throbbing of those with unsympathetic partners, researchers in Heidelberg, Germany, found. Like Pavlov's dogs, patients have learnt to expect reward for their suffering - a massage, a cup of tea or a soothing pill. "The spouse has become a cue," says Herta Flor.

Flor's team zapped patients' backs while the patients' spouses sat behind. They used electrodes to measure electrical activity in the patients' anterior cingulate cortex, a brain region implicated in the emotional processing of pain. Spouses were classified as sympathetic or not according to their usual response to a painful bout.

Trying to distract a patient during a spasm, by suggesting a walk or leaving the room, might be better relief, suspects Flor. Some carers are already trained to do this.

"I'm fascinated," says pain researcher Allan Basbaum of the University of California at San Francisco. Circumstances and social factors are known to affect whether we feel something as pain or a mere pinprick - this study shows that the change also affects the way the body functions. "It partly explains why pain is so difficult to treat," says Basbaum.

Birth trauma

Trauma as babies can partly set our pain threshold as adults, the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Orlando, Florida, also heard yesterday. Mice that underwent stomach surgery just after birth are roughly twice as tolerant of burns and stomach aches as adults when compared with mice that had no surgery, Wendy Sternberg and her group at Haverford College in Pennsylvania discovered.

If they were given morphine to relieve pain after the operation, however, the adult animals' threshold was the same as those that had no surgery. Neonatal life-saving procedures performed under anaesthetic "could make people more likely to experience pain as adults", speculates Sternberg.

Neonatal surgery without anaesthetic was once routine. Newborn babies, whose nervous systems are not fully developed, are not thought to experience pain as adults do. Pain-relief is commonly used partly on ethical grounds.

Sternberg says it is "premature" to suggest abandoning neonatal anaesthesia. But even routine procedures such as circumcision - or natural birth compared with caesarean delivery - could have as-yet unknown effects on subsequent sensitivity, she adds.

Early trauma may boost the animals' subsequent response to stress, she suggests, increasing the release of natural pain-relief molecules.