By Christopher J. Gilligan and David Borsook | Pain Medicine | July 27, 2015
The dramatic impact of chronic pain was captured in a recent European study that followed patients suffering with chronic pain for 1 year: 40% of those patients had more pain and 40% had less pain, but 100% reported major, negative impacts of chronic pain on their quality of life [1]. Half of patients believed that everything possible had been done to manage their pain. This insight into how patients with chronic pain fare reveals a number of salient points, perhaps most importantly highlighting this condition that persists without cure. Furthermore, accumulating evidence suggests that emotional processing in brain networks is more involved in chronic pain [2] alluding to the nature of the associated suffering with the condition.