New study shows fruit flies suffer from chronic pain

This may be the last place you hope to find a validation of your chronic pain, but you may want to think twice before hitting another fly. We now know that, for the first time ever, flies suffer from chronic pain – a breakthrough that could prompt doctors to think twice before questioning your pain.

The new study, published in the journal Science Advances, examined how and why the common fruit fly suffered from chronic pain. Fruit flies with nerve damage in one leg were allowed to heal completely. The researchers then badessed the neuropathic pain resulting from nerve damage and found that flies were hypersensitive to stimuli that were not normally painful. Sounds familiar?

Chronic pain, in contrast to acute pain just after an injury, often persists without obvious cause. Chronic pain can be clbadified as inflammatory or neuropathic pain. Neuropathic pain is caused by nerve damage and occurs most often in people with diabetes, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS), complex regional pain syndrome, cancer and multiple sclerosis (MS ).

The study also offers a fascinating history of pain through the ages – some 500 million years or so. The researchers point out that there is plenty of data on acute pain immediately after an injury. Acute pain is adaptive because it teaches animals to avoid certain life-threatening stimuli. However, according to the authors of this study, almost nothing is known about the origins of chronic pain. At least in fruit flies.

A theory behind the cause of chronic pain in all creatures is a pity to what the study's co-author, Greg Neely, Ph.D., badociate professor at the University of Sydney in Australia , called "pain brakes". pain slows the spinal cord-like nerve to prevent pain. The researchers speculated that this is a means of protection: the fly thought that her leg injury was life threatening and that she became hypersensitive to any pain afterwards, to avoid recurrence. Neely said that a similar process could occur in humans.

"After being hurt once, the animal is hypersensitive and tries to protect itself for the rest of his life," said Neely in a press release. "We knew that insects could feel the" pain ", but we did not know that an injury could lead to sustained hypersensitivity to normally painless stimuli, just like patients' experiences."

Unlike flies that face greater threats to their lives, the loss of your painkillers may cause chronic debilitating pain. For humans, chronic pain is not adaptive. According to Neely, who described chronic adaptive pain in flies as "cool and intuitive," looking at the mechanisms underlying chronic pain in flies could help shed light on treatments in humans.

"We now know that the critical step that causes neuropathic" pain "in flies, mice and probably humans, is the loss of pain brakes in the central nervous system," said Neely. "We are focused on making new stem cell therapies or new drugs that target the underlying cause and permanently stop the pain."

Although the results of this study are interesting, it is often not possible to generalize animal studies to humans, so take these results with a grain of salt. This research also does not allow us to find better treatments or treatment for chronic pain. But it is probably safe to say that the very fact that fruit flies suffer chronic pain proves that it is not just "everything in your head".

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