Managing Your Chronic Neurological Pain

Chronic pain can affect every area of your life and keep you from the things you enjoy. In severe cases, it can be so disruptive that it makes it impossible to go about your daily life. Chronic pain takes a toll on your mind and body, and this is especially true if you suffer from chronic neurological pain.

What Is Chronic Neurological Pain?

When a part of your body is injured, pain receptors from that area release chemicals called neurotransmitters, which send messages to your brain. The messages travel along nerves to your spinal cord and eventually to the brain. Your brain processes them and sends messages back to your body to react.

Most of the time, pain is a useful alarm system designed to keep us safe. But sometimes pain signals keep firing even after the body’s tissues have healed. When pain continues for a long time, such as during a long illness or after a serious injury, it can cause changes to your nervous system that make you more sensitive to pain. This means that certain stimuli make you feel pain more quickly, and the pain can be more intense and last longer.

At that point, chronic neurological pain is considered a brain disease in which changes in neural networks affect multiple aspects of brain function, structure and chemistry. Not only has the pain state changed, but the multiple brain regions involved in sensation, emotion, cognition and pain modulation may produce changes such as anxiety and depression.

Types of Chronic Neurological Pain

Chronic pain is a frequent component of many neurological disorders, affecting 20 percent to 40 percent of patients for many primary neurological diseases.

Neurological pain can be categorized based on its most likely source. In some cases, pain fits into both these categories:

• Neuropathic pain is caused by nerve damage due to an injury or disease. Neuropathic pain sensations are often described as burning, tingling, shooting or like electric shocks. Examples of conditions that cause neuropathic pain are diabetic neuropathy, shingles and sciatica.
• Nociplastic pain is caused by changes in how the nervous system processes pain. The changes that cause nociplastic pain are not linked with a clear injury, tissue damage, inflammation or disease. The sensations related to this kind of pain vary widely. Examples of nociplastic pain include fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome and chronic low back pain.

Treating Chronic Neurological Pain

The goal of pain management is to improve your quality of life and function — allowing you to participate in daily activities. Treatment options vary depending on your type of pain and its duration.

Common forms of pain management include:

• Medicine
• Medical devices
• Surgery
• Behavioral therapy
• Physical therapy
• Occupational therapy
• Lifestyle changes

While not all pain is curable, all pain can be managed. No current treatments have been proven effective in treating all types of pain or in every person. Early targeted treatment generally provides better long-term results. If you are living with pain, you should work with your healthcare team to decide which treatments are best for you.