{"id":217536,"date":"2025-07-10T01:45:43","date_gmt":"2025-07-10T06:45:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/from-injury-to-agony-scientists-discover-brain-pathway-that-turns-pain-into-suffering"},"modified":"2025-07-10T01:45:43","modified_gmt":"2025-07-10T06:45:43","slug":"from-injury-to-agony-scientists-discover-brain-pathway-that-turns-pain-into-suffering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/from-injury-to-agony-scientists-discover-brain-pathway-that-turns-pain-into-suffering","title":{"rendered":"From injury to agony: Scientists discover brain pathway that turns pain into suffering"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/from-injury-to-agony-scientists-discover-brain-pathway-that-turns-pain-into-suffering.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Pain isn\u2019t just a physical sensation\u2014it also carries emotional weight. That distress, anguish, and anxiety can turn a fleeting injury into long-term suffering.<\/p>\n<p>Researchers at the Salk Institute have now identified a <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/brain+circuit\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">brain circuit<\/a> that gives physical pain its emotional tone, revealing a new potential target for treating chronic and affective pain conditions such as fibromyalgia, migraine, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).<\/p>\n<p>Published in <i>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/i>, <a href=\"https:\/\/pnas.org\/doi\/10.1073\/pnas.2505889122\" target=\"_blank\">the study<\/a> identifies a group of neurons in a central brain area called the thalamus that appears to mediate the emotional (affective) side of pain in mice. This new pathway challenges the textbook understanding of how pain is processed in the brain and body.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Pain isn\u2019t just a physical sensation\u2014it also carries emotional weight. That distress, anguish, and anxiety can turn a fleeting injury into long-term suffering. Researchers at the Salk Institute have now identified a brain circuit that gives physical pain its emotional tone, revealing a new potential target for treating chronic and affective pain conditions such as [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-217536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217536"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217536\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}