A recent study has revealed that treating chronic pain can reverse brain changes in the patients.

Chronic pain can severely lead to depression and even problems with concentration and memory. Also, researchers found in a study that they made on a patient’s suffering from chronic pain that long-term pain can easily lead to physical changes in the brain.

According to the new Canadian research, it was noticed by the researchers that an effective treatment of the illness can reverse the brain changes. The study was published this week in the Journal of Neuroscience and was done by the group of pain researchers from McGill University and the McGill University Health Centre under which they found that relieving pain actually causes physical brain changes, which they saw in the brain scan.

The research was done over 18 chronic pain patients, who had been suffering from the pain for more than six months and who underwent either long-acting pain reliever injections into the lower spine, or spinal surgery. The patient’s brain responses were then tested to cognitive tests to examine their brains' structures. MRI scans were conducted on every patient to measure the cortical thickness of the brain and brain activity while the subjects were performing a simple cognitive task.

It was then found that the brain activity was abnormal during the attention-demanding cognitive task and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of the brain (which plays a key role in mood, social judgment, short-term memory and higher-order thinking) was thinner in the patients with chronic pain as compared to the healthy patients.