Experience my pain ‘first-hand’
It is difficult for a person to truly understand the bouts of physical pain we may sometimes feel, unless they can somehow venture inside our body and experience it first-hand. An ongoing trial by Stanford University researchers in America may help health professionals to measure and detect pain in people – particularly in elderly dementia patients.
It is difficult for a person to truly understand the bouts of physical pain we may sometimes feel, unless they can somehow venture inside our body and experience it first-hand.
An ongoing trial by Stanford University researchers in America may help health professionals to measure and detect pain in people – particularly elderly dementia patients, who may sometimes be unable to express levels of physical pain.
To do this, researchers have combined neuroimaging devices with software that could alert nurses and physicians when a patient is in pain.
Reuters reports participants underwent brain scans while investigators touched them with objects with increasing degrees of heat, and then used computer data from the scans to detect brain activity patterns consistent with pain.
With hopes that the technology will soon be used for the improved detection and better treatment of chronic pain, researchers say they are now attempting to use the neuroimaging to “objectively detect” whether a person is in a state of pain or not.
