A new research has warned against the short-term decision of using painkillers. Findings made by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder said usage of the medicine could lead to devastating consequences of increasing pain and make it last longer than usual.
"We are showing for the first time that even a brief exposure to opioids can have long-term negative effects on pain," said lead researcher Peter Grace. They found out that opioids like morphine paradoxically cause an increase in chronic pain in lab rats. "The results suggest that the recent escalation of opioid prescriptions in humans may be a contributor to chronic pain," he said. The study showed that just a few days of morphine treatment caused chronic pain that went on for several months by exacerbating the release of pain signals from specific immune cells in the spinal cord.
"We found the treatment was contributing to the problem." Published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study showed that a peripheral nerve injury in rats sends a message from damaged nerve cells to spinal cord immune cells known as glial cells, which normalkly act as 'housekeepers' to clear out unwanted debris and micro-organisms. The first signal of pain sends glial cells into an alert mode, priming them for further action. On treating the injury with just five days of opioids, the glial cells went into an overdrive, triggering a cascade of actions, including spinal cord inflammation.
They discovered that the pain signals from a peripheral injury combined with subsequent morphine treatment worked together to cause a glial cell signalling cascade. "The implications for people taking opioids can have devastating consequences of making pain worse and longer lasting," said Linda Watkins, Professor at the university. "This is a very ugly side to opioids that had not been recognised before."
