Mosabbir Abdullah
Neuro Spinal Innovations, Mississauga, ON L5M 1M2, Canada.
Faculty of Music, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5S 2C5, Canada.
Life (Basel). 2022 Dec 28;13(1):84. doi: 10.3390/life13010084.
Chronic back pain is complex and there is no guarantee that treating its potential causes will cause the pain to go away. Therefore, rather than attempting to "cure" chronic pain, many clinicians, caregivers and researchers aim to help educate patients about their pain and try to help them live a better quality of life despite their condition. A systematic review has demonstrated that patient education has a large effect on pain and pain related disability when done in conjunction with treatments. Therefore, understanding and updating our current state of knowledge of the pathophysiology of back pain is important in educating patients as well as guiding the development of novel therapeutics. Growing evidence suggests that back pain causes morphological changes in the central nervous system and that these changes have significant overlap with those seen in common neurodegenerative disorders. These similarities in mechanisms may explain the associations between chronic low back pain and cognitive decline and brain fog. The neurodegenerative underpinnings of chronic low back pain demonstrate a new layer of understanding for this condition, which may help inspire new strategies in pain education and management, as well as potentially improve current treatment.
慢性背痛情况复杂，治疗其潜在病因也未必能消除疼痛。因此，许多临床医生、护理人员和研究人员并非试图“治愈”慢性疼痛，而是致力于帮助患者了解自身疼痛情况，并努力帮助他们在患病的情况下仍能过上质量更高的生活。一项系统综述表明，患者教育与治疗相结合时，对疼痛及与疼痛相关的残疾状况有很大影响。因此，了解并更新我们目前对背痛病理生理学的认识，对于教育患者以及指导新型疗法的开发都很重要。越来越多的证据表明，背痛会导致中枢神经系统发生形态变化，而且这些变化与常见神经退行性疾病中的变化有很大重叠。这些机制上的相似之处或许可以解释慢性下背痛与认知衰退和脑雾之间的关联。慢性下背痛的神经退行性基础为这一病症展现了新的理解层面，这可能有助于激发疼痛教育和管理方面的新策略，并有可能改进现有治疗方法。
