How do the pain you experience in your daily life affect your memory?

How do normal daily pains, such as headaches and back pain, affect our thinking ability? Recent studies have also shown that healthy, painful individuals have deficiencies in working memory, or the cognitive process of retaining and manipulating information in a short period of time. Previous studies have suggested that working memory pain-related disorders depend on the level of emotional distress of the individual. However, the specific brain and psychological factors that underlie the role of emotional distress in contributing to this relationship are not well understood.

A new study entitled “Modeling the Neurological and Self-Reporting Factors of Emotional Distress in the Relationship between Pain and Working Memory in Healthy Individuals” was published in the journal. Neuropsychosis I tried to deal with this gap in literature. This study was recently written by a PhD in Psychology from the University of Miami. Graduate students Stephen Anderson, Joanna Whitkin, Taylor Bolt and their advisor Elizabeth Rosin, director of the Institute of Social, Cultural and Neuroscience at Miami University. Maria Labre, Professor and Vice Chairman of the Faculty of Psychology. Claire Ashton James, Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney.

Use publicly available research brain Images from the Human Connectome Project (HCP), a large-scale project sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) aimed at building a map of the complete structural and functional connections of the healthy human brain. Self-reported data. Brain imaging and self-reported data from 416 HCP participants were analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), a statistical method for modeling complex relationships between multiple variables. In 228 participants who reported experiencing some degree of pain 7 days before the study, the authors found that the higher the intensity of pain, the more commonly used working memory test performance of the n-back task. Was directly discovered to decrease. In the n-back task, participants will see a series of characters and ask if the displayed characters have previously been displayed on some screens. The more screens in the sequence that participants are asked to recall, the more working memory is needed.

In addition, the authors found that higher pain intensity indirectly reduced working memory capacity through increased activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), a specific area of ​​the center of the prefrontal cortex during n-back tasks. I found it to be related. vmPFC is an area of ​​the brain involved in pain, emotional distress, and cognition. Interestingly, the relationship between daily pain and vmPFC brain activity in this study is Chronic pain..

“Healthy participants with low reported pain levels were found to have different levels of activity at vmPFC during n-back tasks compared to healthy participants who did not report pain. What should be noted is that this pattern of activity is more chronic pain than healthy patients who are exposed to pain manipulation in the laboratory, “Witkin said.

In contrast, the authors found that certain aspects of emotional distress reported by participants, such as anger, fear, and perceived stress, were not associated with working memory performance.

“Studies investigating the relationship between pain and cognition have typically focused on patients with chronic pain or study participants who have been given ly induced pain,” Anderson said. “Pain Common experience For many, we are surprisingly little aware of how everyday pain experiences affect cognition. “

By using publicly available HCP datasets, researchers can include data from a much larger group of participants than is common in brain imaging studies due to the high cost of brain scans. I did. This large sample allows the author to use structural equation modeling. This is a statistical technique that allows you to understand complex relationships between multiple variables and, in this case, helps explain how pain works. Memory..The authors note that their findings have potential impacts, both clinical and non-clinical.Clinical setting..

“This study pain Even healthy people can develop the ability to think and point out how this happens in the brain. ”