Prescribing opioids in the right doses could help tackle one of the underlying causes of chronic pain, as well as providing temporary pain relief, new research suggests.
Opioids are a class of psychoactive chemicals that work by binding to receptors primarily found in the central and peripheral nervous system.
Researchers at MedUni Vienna's Department of Neurophysiology wrote in the magazine Science that opioids can eliminate what is referred to as a memory trace for pain that appears in the spinal chord.
In effect, they found that providing high doses of opioids intravenously over the course of an hour completely deleted this memory trace, which is believed to be one of the underlying causes of chronic pain.
This pain memory can lead to the sensation of amplified pain that lasts much longer than the actual cause of the pain, potentially leading to chronic pain syndrome.
"If our approach turns out to be effective under clinical conditions, this would herald a paradigm shift in pain therapy," said Dr Jurgen Sandkuhler, who co-led the study.
"It would mean moving away from the temporary, purely symptom-based pain therapy to a long-term removal of the cause of pain based on pain mechanisms using opioids."