An international team of researchers has announced the discovery of a gene that increases susceptibility to chronic pain, which may lead to new treatments and possible cures and prevention for chronic pain sufferers.
The report, published in Genome Research, came from a research team at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJ) where Prof. Marshall Devor and Prof. Ariel Darvasi are heading a team of Israeli and international researchers from the University of Toronto in Canada, Sanofi-Aventis in Germany and the Karolinska Institute Center for Oral Biology in Sweden.
It is estimated that up to one in five adults world wide are suffering from chronic pain of some form, often as a result of nerve damage from an injury, but can also be from arthritis or another nerve condition, chronic headaches or back pain or even psychogenic pain which has no discernable medical cause.
For some time medical science has known that some individuals are more prone to developing chronic pain than others, even when given almost identical conditions.
The recent discovery of the gene that may predispose a person to chronic pain gives hope that treatment or a cure may be found in the near future. The gene in question is a region of chromosome 15 in mice that is believed to carry a genetic variant that contributes to pain.
The research team is still working to identify exactly which gene is the variant in question, but the current work is giving cause for hope for people living with chronic pain.
For further details, see:
http://www.israel21c.org/201008238246/health/the-gene-at-the-heart-of-pain