Pain can now be measured

You can now feel someone’s pain. Scientists have found a way to measure the depth of a person’s suffering.

Till now, the only way to assess pain was to ask people what they were feeling. But a series of studies involving brain-imaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has changed things.

Scientists have found distinct differences between the brains of people in pain and those who are not, The Times reported on Saturday.

“Pain seems to increase the blood flow to certain parts of the brain, roughly in proportion to the amount of pain felt, and we can measure that activation in a brain scan,” the paper quoted Irene Tracey, professor of anaesthetic science at Oxford University and director of its centre for fMRI and the brain, as saying.

The findings, which suggest that pain could one day be measured objectively, may throw up legal and social challenges as they could become a key factor in deciding accident claims and similar cases, the paper said.

Scientists found that the brain possesses what they call a “pain matrix”, the paper said. Pain activates more than a dozen parts of the brain, which is in contrast to other senses such as vision or hearing, where stimuli are generally fed to just one part of the brain for interpretation.

Tracey, who described her research at the Cheltenham Science Festival, told The Times that they wanted to build a model based on data collected from scans of different people. The scans of people in pain will then be compared with the model to measure the true depth of their suffering, she said.