Chronic pain is a huge problem that affects more than 1.5 billion individuals across the globe. It is defined as persistent pain that lasts anywhere between a couple of weeks to years. This pain usually evolves from acute pain that is caused by tissue damage owing to an injury or surgery. Researchers consider nerve damage to be a crucial factor in the transition to chronic pain. However, the events underlying the emergence of chronic pain hadn’t previously been discovered — until now.
New research from the University of California, Irvine has found the molecular mechanisms that control the transition from acute pain to chronic pain. In their report, the researchers noted that this mechanism was a target for ailment-modifying medications. Their findings were published in the “Sciences Advances” journal.
The researchers explained that disabling an intracellular enzyme known as NAAA (N-acylethanolamine acid amidase) in the spinal cord in a specified time frame after a peripheral tissue injury stopped the development of chronic pain in female and male mice.
Professor Daniele Piomelli of the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology at the institution stated that delineating the timing, localization and nature of the occurrences involved in pain chronicity was essential in order to identify the control nodes in the process, which could be targeted by novel classes of illness-modifying therapeutics that weren’t analgesics. Piomelli explained that their research was the first to pinpoint that the NAAA, which prior to this was an unknown control node, could be targeted effectively by small-molecule therapeutics that would hinder this enzyme and prevent the transition to chronic pain from acute pain.
Piomelli then noted that the study’s discoveries proposed that a new class of drugs, i.e., inhibitors of NAAA, could be utilized in the treatment of different forms of chronic pain as well as in the prevention of inflammatory and incisional injuries after an operation.
Chronic pain remains severely undertreated, given that it’s typically resistant to therapy. Normally, the treatment for chronic pain primarily depends on a few analgesic drug classes such as opioids, which are known to cause addiction as well as lose efficacy over time. Epidemiological research has shown that chronic pain is a major risk factor for opioid use disorder, with data showing that more than 60% of individuals who have misused the drugs did so in order to achieve pain relief.
The study’s findings will therefore be useful in the development of better and more effective treatments for chronic pain and the decrease of opioid use. There is a chance that the psychedelic-based medications being developed by companies such as Tryp Therapeutics Inc. (CSE: TRYP) (OTCQB: TRYPF) may provide the missing link to modifying the pathways through which acute pain evolves into chronic pain.
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