A method to treat chronic nerve pain at its source with the body’s own painkillers with no side effects could also be used to deliver other drugs to the brain and to other parts of the body, according to its developers at Linköping University in Sweden. The device, which has so far only been tested on animals in accordance with medical device regulations, works by preventing pain signals from reaching the brain at all.
In a paper in the journal Science Advance — an open-access sister publication to Science — the team, led by Prof Magnus Berggren, explains that chronic pain is suffered by some 30 per cent of the population, with seven per cent suffering from neuropathic pain, where damaged or misfiring nerves leave the sufferer in constant misery which, furthermore, is difficult to treat. Standard therapies using painkillers tends to be systemic — that is, the drug is delivered to the whole body, with only a fraction of the dosage actually affecting the pain, and the rest can cause side-effects elsewhere. Targeting pain precisely is notoriously difficult.
