Building Elements of the Adaptive and Pathological Pain Neural Networks

Abstract

Everybody try to avoid pain, but pain is required for survival and maintaining the integrity of the organism. Pain has evolved as a physiological function which is lifesaving. The brief, acute, nociceptive pain is useful in order to signal tissue damage. The tonic ongoing pain which follows, helps to protect the wounded place, facilitating the healing process. As such, pain is an adaptive phenomenon, but dysfunctional pain which persists long time after healing of the initial injury or can appear also in the absence of an obvious trigger, can be life destroying. This chronic pain results only in a marked decrease in people’s quality of life. Chronic pain is a disease in its own right and big efforts are made in order to understand the molecular, cellular and neural mechanisms of pain generation, temporal development and persistence, with the aim of finding therapies to reduce people’s suffering (Scholz and Woolf 2002). The adaptive role of pain perception is even more illustrated by cases of congenital analgesia, when distinct channelopathies eliminate the ability to feel pain. The affected persons have high rates of early mortality due to repetitive fractures and self-mutilation (Peirs and Seal 2016). As such, pain motivates decisions to act, in order to escape or remove a noxious stimulus.