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veggie

Registered: 07/25/04
Posts: 17,501
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Love takes up where pain leaves off, brain study shows
#13332282 - 10/13/10 05:44 PM (13 years, 3 months ago) |
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Love takes up where pain leaves
off, brain study shows
October 13, 2010 - Stanford.edu
Intense, passionate feelings of love
can provide amazingly effective
pain relief, similar to painkillers or such illicit drugs as cocaine,
according to a new Stanford University School of Medicine study.
“When people are in this
passionate, all-consuming phase of love, there are significant
alterations in their mood that are impacting their experience of pain,”
said Sean Mackey, MD, PhD, chief of the Division of Pain Management,
associate professor of anesthesia and senior author of the study,
published online Oct. 13 in PLoS ONE. “We’re beginning to tease apart
some of these reward systems in the brain and how they influence pain.
These are very deep, old systems in our brain that involve dopamine — a
primary neurotransmitter that influences mood, reward and motivation.”
Scientists aren’t quite yet ready to tell patients with chronic pain to
throw out the painkillers and replace them with a passionate love
affair; rather, the hope is that a better understanding of these
neural-rewards pathways that get triggered by love could lead to new
methods for producing pain relief.
“It turns out that the areas of the brain activated by intense love are
the same areas that drugs use to reduce pain,” said Arthur Aron, PhD, a
professor of psychology at State University of New York at Stony Brook
and one of the study’s authors. Aron has been studying love for 30
years. “When thinking about your beloved, there is intense activation
in the reward area of the brain — the same area that lights up when you
take cocaine, the same area that lights up when you win a lot of money.”
The concept for the study was sparked several years ago at a
neuroscience conference when Aron, an expert in the study of love, met
up with Mackey, an expert in the research of pain, and they began
talking.
“Art was talking about love,” Mackey said. “I was talking about pain.
He was talking about the brain systems involved with love. I was
talking about the brain systems involved with pain. We realized there
was this tremendous overlapping system. We started wondering, ‘Is it
possible that the two modulate each other?’”
After the conference, Mackey returned to Stanford and collaborated with
postdoctoral scholar Jarred Younger, PhD, now an assistant professor of
anesthesia, who was also intrigued with the idea. Together the three
set up a study that would entail examining the brain images of
undergraduates who claimed to be “in that first phase of intense love.”
“We posted fliers around Stanford University and within hours we had
undergrads banging on our door,” Mackey said. The fliers asked for
couples who were in the first nine months of a romantic relationship.
“It was clearly the easiest study the pain center at Stanford has ever
recruited for,” Mackey said. “When you’re in love you want to tell
everybody about it.
“We intentionally focused on this early phase of passionate love,” he
added. “We specifically were not looking for longer-lasting, more
mature phases of the relationship. We wanted subjects who were feeling
euphoric, energetic, obsessively thinking about their beloved, craving
their presence.
“When passionate love is described like this, it in some ways sounds
like an addiction. We thought, ‘Maybe this does involve similar brain
systems as those involved in addictions which are heavily
dopamine-related.’ Dopamine is the neurotransmitter in our brain that
is intimately involved with feeling good.”
Researchers recruited 15 undergraduates (eight women and seven men) for
the study. Each was asked to bring in photos of their beloved and
photos of an equally attractive acquaintance. The researchers then
successively flashed the pictures before the subjects, while heating up
a computer-controlled thermal stimulator placed in the palm of their
hand to cause mild pain. At the same time, their brains were scanned in
a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine.
The undergraduates were also tested for levels of pain relief while
being distracted with word-association tasks such as: “Think of sports
that don’t involve balls.” Scientific evidence has shown in the past
that distraction causes pain relief, and researchers wanted to make
sure that love was not just working as a distraction from pain.
Results showed that both love and distraction did equally reduce pain,
and at much higher levels than by concentrating on the photo of the
attractive acquaintance, but interestingly the two methods of pain
reduction used very different brain pathways.
“With the distraction test, the brain pathways leading to pain relief
were mostly cognitive,” Younger said. “The reduction of pain was
associated with higher, cortical parts of the brain. Love-induced
analgesia is much more associated with the reward centers. It appears
to involve more primitive aspects of the brain, activating deep
structures that may block pain at a spinal level — similar to how
opioid analgesics work.
“One of the key sites for love-induced analgesia is the nucleus
accumbens, a key reward addiction center for opioids, cocaine and other
drugs of abuse. The region tells the brain that you really need to keep
doing this,” Younger said.
“This tells us that you don’t have to just rely on drugs for pain
relief,” Aron said. “People are feeling intense rewards without the
side effects of drugs.”
Other Stanford contributors include research assistants Sara Parke and
Neil Chatterjee.
Funding for the study was received
from the Chris Redlich Pain Research Fund. Information about the
Department of Anesthesia, which also supported the research, is
available at http://med.stanford.edu/anesthesia/.
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trip forever
Stranger


Registered: 08/21/09
Posts: 5,873
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Re: Love takes up where pain leaves off, brain study shows [Re: veggie]
#13332423 - 10/13/10 06:10 PM (13 years, 3 months ago) |
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Didn't Butters, in Southpark, show this when he was talking to those emo kids, when Kyle got dumped?
I think the episode "Raisins"
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muistrue
Inspired by the mystery


Registered: 03/20/05
Posts: 12,899
Loc: Behind the Redwoods
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Re: Love takes up where pain leaves off, brain study shows [Re: veggie]
#13332612 - 10/13/10 06:51 PM (13 years, 3 months ago) |
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Good article, I've been noticing this is true.
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Trichodermatologst
Trusted Contaminator


Registered: 10/06/10
Posts: 37
Loc: in your jars
Last seen: 10 years, 10 months
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Re: Love takes up where pain leaves off, brain study shows [Re: muistrue]
#13332674 - 10/13/10 07:01 PM (13 years, 3 months ago) |
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good article
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5-HT2A

Registered: 01/30/10
Posts: 1,794
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Re: Love takes up where pain leaves off, brain study shows [Re: Trichodermatologst]
#13332967 - 10/13/10 08:03 PM (13 years, 3 months ago) |
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This is mostly old news. It's been known sex/love trigger the release of endorphins, dopamine, oxytocin etc. The only thing new is officially setting up an experiment to see if pain relief occurs due to the release of some of these which presumably it will. I mean love is a painkiller, drugs are pain killers, same receptor site, level of desire, same thing. I think they are just using new technologies to confirm something already known in a different way.
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auronlives69
psychedelic monk


Registered: 04/19/09
Posts: 655
Last seen: 4 years, 6 months
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Re: Love takes up where pain leaves off, brain study shows [Re: 5-HT2A]
#13334575 - 10/14/10 05:37 AM (13 years, 3 months ago) |
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cant have love without pain, the way of the universe
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