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Pain Turns Off Attention Switch

It's hard to concentrate when you're in pain. Research shows that pain is a stressor to the body. The mind diverts energy and resources to process that pain all the while the person is trying to do a task.

Chronic pain patients face this problem everyday. It's called attentional processing. But are their attention deficits due to sharing of resources? Or does the mind/body switch from one to the other? That's the focus of this study.

Fourteen (14) patients with chronic pain rated as moderate-to-severe were compared to 30 healthy controls who had no pain. Two tasks were given: one was easy, the other difficult. In the easy task everyone was shown a colored rectangle. They were told to push one button if the rectangle was blue and another button if it was some other color.

In the difficult task the subjects were shown rectangles of different sizes. They had to keep a running memory of two rectangles at a time to compare whether they were equal in size. They were also shown pictures in between tests. No response was required to the pictures. They just had to pay attention to each one.

The chronic pain group was faster in responding but made more mistakes compared to the control group. It seems they traded accuracy for speed and made more impulsive responses. This was true for both the easy and the more difficult tasks. They were also more distracted by the extra stimuli (pictures shown).

The authors conclude that pain patients don't have a shortage of resources to process information and to do tasks. Instead they have abnormal use of their ability to pay attention. In other words, they can't use their full attention on a task when they are in pain. Patients who used morphine-based pain relievers had better results. Future studies may help find the best way to control pain while restoring cognitive function.

References: D. S. Veldhuijzen, et al. Processing Capacity in Chronic Pain Patients: A Visual Event-Related Potentials Study. In Pain. March 2006. Vol. 121. No. 1-2. Pp. 60-68.

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