Around half of all patients with chronic pain report suffering from several parts of the body.Physicians speak of «multi-site chronic pain» (MCP). With the number of pain locations, the risk of dementia also increases, reports a team led by Yiheng Tu from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing in the journal»Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences». Possible cause of this is damage in the hippocampus as a result of pain-related neuronal degradation.
The researchers evaluated data from the UK-_ Biobank long-term survey. The experts took a closer look at 350 000 of the participants and formed three groups: half of the people had no permanent pain at all and served as a control, a quarter recorded chronic pain («single-site-chronic pain», SCP) and the other quarter suffered from MCP. Twelve years after the first evaluation, 0.9-_ percent of people in the control group have dementia.In SCP patients, it was 1,2 percent and in people with chronic pain in several parts of the body 1,6 Percent. With each additional point of pain, the risk of memory impairment increased, even as the experts factored out other risk factors. But what does chronic pain have to do with a loss of memory?
Already at the first data collection, the people with multiple pain sites performed worse than the control group in seven out of eleven cognitive tests, while the SCP group only performed in two tests. In the MCP patients, the hippocampus was also smaller than in the other groups, its size decreased with the number of pain sites. The brain region is essential for memory formation. «Multilocular chronic pain causes the hippocampus to age up to eight years faster, which may underlie a number of cognitive loads,» says first author Yiheng . Tu.
Source — https://www.spektrum.de/news/chronische-schmerzen-erhoehen-das-risiko-fuer-eine-demenz/2122923