WebMD Medical News Laura J. Martin, MD May 18, 2011 -- Chronic
lower back pain doesn't just hurt. It also appears to cause
thinning of certain regions of the brain, which may lead to
cognitive impairments, a study shows. Researchers studying the
link between pain and such thinning had hoped that successfully
treating back pain would halt that process. Instead, it reversed
it. Six months after surgery or spinal injections, a brain
region associated with pain -- the dorsolateral prefrontal
cortex -- had thickened. "We thought it would be able to slow
down the thinning, but to actually recover was pretty amazing,"
says study researcher Laura S. Stone, PhD, a neuroscientist at
McGill University in Montreal. The study is published in The
Journal of Neuroscience. Stone and colleagues recruited 18
patients who were seeking treatment for chronic lower back pain,
which they had had for at least a year. Prior to treatment, each
patient had an MRI to measure cortical brain thickness and to
assess brain activity during a