Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Chronic Pain Shrinks The Brain

Posted by timothy on from the as-long-as-it-doesn't-touch-my-10-percent dept.

An anonymous reader writes "LiveScience is reporting on a study showing that people with chronic lower back pain have 5 to 11 percent less gray matter than pain-free folks. Its not known for sure why, but the thinking is that neurons just get worn out as the mind deals with the pain."

4 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. Re:In soviet russia... by sailforsingapore · · Score: 1, Informative

    True...but remembering my biology training, it becomes very clear how easy it would be to completely flub such a small scale thing. I remember carrying out much simpler and seemingly straight foreward experiments and getting frightening divergent data. The best example of which was in carrying out an experiment involving fertilizer and cyanobacteria, I was amazed to find that they were all dead, even at the lowest level added of the chemical fertillizers. I later realized that I had created a mild acid with the proportions of fertilizers I added to the water, causing my entire sample to perish. It would have happened every time the eperiment was repeated, had I not caught that fundimental flaw. Thats why I remain skeptical, even of very well trained and qualified scientists...simply because everyone can make silly mistakes.

  2. Alice Cooper sang about this... by Kevin+Burtch · · Score: 2, Informative

    He knew about the real cause way back in 1980!

    .

    --
    - Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -
  3. Re:/.'s Chronic Problems with Causality by dtfinch · · Score: 2, Informative

    I hope it starts a revolutionary concept: thinking

    You know it'll never happen.

  4. Re:Interestingly enough... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    No, removing simply the word pain would render an inaccurate statement. The myth that marijuana smoking shrinks the brain, or causes toxic effects to the brain stems from several fundamentally flawed studies, and the temporary short term memory defecits users experience. The popular drug that is proven to cause brain damage and shrink the brain would be alcohol.

    Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of reasons to avoid marijuana, especially because the common method of administration - smoking - is proven to be harmful. Still, spreading misinformation does nothing to alleviate the drug problems we face.

    Proven brain damage from alcohol:
    http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category/9416.html /

    Debunking the marijuana-brain damage myth:
    http://content.health.msn.com/content/article/70/8 0972.htm/