New York - A new study conducted on 24 men and women treated at a pain clinic suggests that chronic pain can impair people’s short term memory.
Dr. Bruce D. Dick stated that multitasking can tax people’s ability to retain a piece of information, which could translate to an instance where you forget something, like a phone number, while you are doing something else.
According to Dr. Dick, an assistant professor of anesthesiology, chronic pain can disrupt the working memory’s ability to temporarily hold information before it can be stored in long-term memory since chronic pain eats up the brains resources devoted to short-term memory.
Chronic pain drains the brain’s resources which are supposed to be divided into different tasks which we do everyday.
According to the study, patients who were impaired due to their pain showed problems in their memory, which only supports the finding that chronic pain patients’ memory suffers from their physical condition.
This study hopes to help chronic pain patients recognize if their cognitive function is being disrupted by pain, and find ways to overcome them.