Technology to treat the phenomenon of 'pain of ghosts'

Thanks to computer technology that interacts with the brain, patients with disabilities will no longer suffer from pain in the paralyzed limb or lost.

Japanese scientists have found a way to treat "ghost pain" in people with disabilities, using technology that uses computers to control brain activity, according to Live Science. The study was published in Nature Communications on October 27.

The "pain of the limb" is when a person feels pain in the arm or leg, whether the limb is lost or paralyzed . "They still feel pain such as burns or pain due to hypersensitivity that conventional painkillers do not work , " said Dr. Ben Seymour, a neuroscience scientist at Cambridge University, England, copper. report author said.

Some people with disabilities still feel pain in the limb.(Artwork: Painresource).

Usually, the brain that controls movement of the upper body, neurosurgeon Dr. Takufumi Yanagisawa, Osaka University, Japan, the lead author of the study, said.

When movement occurs, the brain receives feedback from the senses to check whether the movement follows the will of the person or not. It's not just information from the eye (seeing the body part moving) but also the tactile and sensory information in the space from the body itself, which is sent from the muscle to the brain.

However, if the body wants to be paralyzed or no longer, the brain will not receive that feedback. The contrast between the intention to move and the actual result, is believed to be the source of these pain, according to Yanagisawa.

In the past, when using computer interaction technology with the brain, researchers thought that just by moving brain information into the movement of prostheses would the pain disappear.

However, patients treated in this way said they felt even more pain, according to Yanagisawa. The reason is that it does not eliminate the contrast between the intention to move and the feedback signal that the brain receives. Even if the patient sees a prosthetic movement, they still don't feel it or have feedback from the muscles about the position of the prosthesis in space.

Connecting the system interacts with the brain.(Photo: Osaka University).

The Japanese team tried a different approach on the same group of patients. They ask the patient to try to move an imaginary arm from the opposite side to the place where it feels painful. For example, a patient with a left or paralyzed left hand will imagine having a right arm and trying to move it. This activity signal of the brain will be recorded by the interactive program and translated into movement of prosthetics.

With this approach, the patient's pain has been relieved, even temporarily. By ordering the arm to imagine moving, the brain will also wait for a response from this arm, not from the real hand.

However, the research team also said that they have not been able to widely apply this treatment and treatment costs are also very high.