Toronto: Freedom from chronic low back pain normalises brain activity, a research has revealed.
Commonly found in adults, low back pain affects brain parts linked with pain processing and its components like depression and anxiety.
A group of researchers from McGill University and its Health Centre posed a fundamental question to a team of patients of low back pain about to undergo treatment: If you can alleviate chronic low back pain, can you reverse these changes in the brain?
MRI scans were conducted on each subject before and six months after their treatments. "When they came back in, we wanted to know whether their pain had lessened and whether their daily lives had improved," said the study co-author Laura S. Stone from McGill University.
Not only did the team observe recovery in the anatomical function of the brain, but also in its ability to function. The abnormal brain activity observed initially during an attention-demanding cognitive task was found to have normalized after treatment.
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