3 days Ago By [email protected] (Phoebe Tonks)
Every year in the UK around 28 million adults will suffer from chronic pain , which can have a significant and devastating impact on their day to day lives. This condition can make everything from personal care, to attending work and education a daily battle to stay on top of their pain levels, with some sufferers even unable to get out of bed due to skyrocketing pain levels. Up until now, one of the most common ways to treat chronic pain has been by prescribing strong painkillers, such as opiates like morphine and fentanyl, which often carry with them a number of unpleasant side effects as well as being worryingly addictive.
However that could soon be set to change, after a recent study discovered a new way to tackle chronic pain - that could see sufferers get their lives back without relying on such dangerous medications. The breakthrough came from Professor Nikita Gamper at the University of Leeds’ School of Biomedical Sciences and his team, who have discovered that the body can effectively produce its own targeted “sleeping pills” – akin to benzodiazepines - dulling signals from a particular nerve and controlling how much pain a person feels. Professor Gamper said: “We understand quite a bit about how a person ends up feeling pain , but we can't do much about it.
Despite all the amazing discoveries and textbooks written, opioids are still the gold standard. “Nothing substantially better than opioids has been produced. If you suffer from pain, you will likely end up with either ibuprofen, which is OK for mild pain, but absolutely does nothing for very strong pain or neuropathic pain; or opioids which are very efficacious but dangerous.
” Building on previous work conducted by Professor Gamper and Professor Xiaona Du at Hebei Medical University in Shijiazhuang, China, the findings could potentially pave the way to a new breakthrough treatment that shifts away from the current standard of strong opiates. With new funding now having been awarded to better pursue this research, scientists behind the study will further investigate how this might help people living with chronic pain in the New Year. The findings stem from the body’s own ability to produce something akin to Benzodiazepines, a common class of drug used to help people sleep and to calm anxiety.
Professor Gamper and his colleagues found that some cells attached to human nerves, residing in structures called spinal ganglia, can release a specific peptide that works on the same principle as benzos. Yet unlike the drugs, because the process is localised to the peripheral nervous system, these peptides do not cause the whole nervous system to “go to sleep” – meaning they don’t carry the same risks as harmful and addictive opioids. This means that if properly harnessed, the human body could potentially have the power to “tune out” the amount of pain a person is experiencing.
This revolutionary breakthrough could offer new hope to the millions of people living with chronic pain every day, especially as The Health Foundation has predicted rates of chronic pain to skyrocket before 2040. Professor Gamper’s findings – published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation (JCI) in June 2024 - open up the possibility of developing new, targeted medicines that could block pain signals without crossing the blood-brain barrier and affecting other brain functions. This in effect, could mean pain levels could be well controlled or wiped out completely, allowing sufferers to get their lives back without navigating the minefield of opiate side effects, such as memory loss, nausea and even “feeling like a zombie.
” Although further research is still required, thanks to an award of £3.5million from the Medical Research Council and the pharmaceuticals industry, a new project lasting for five years is set to launch at University of Leeds in January which will look more closely at potential markers of neuropathic pain and new approaches for pain management..
