Medical Scientists #135: Suffering from Chronic Pain?

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Up to 40% of Swedes suffer from long-term pain at some point, and 2 to 4% suffer from fibromyalgia.

Pain is an unpleasant experience consisting of sensory impressions and emotions. It is a subjective experience, and it is the individual himself who decides whether to suffer from it, says Eva Kosik, professor of clinical pain research at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet and also professor of the same subject at the Department of Surgical Sciences at Uppsala University.

Eva Kosek is also a senior physician at the Pain Center at the Academic Hospital in Uppsala. In Episode 135 of KI’s Medicinvetarna podcast, she talks about defining the different types of pain. She herself was involved in introducing the term new pain mechanism for nociplastic pain, that is, pain caused by the pain system itself not working as it should.

– Many patients with fibromyalgia and other pain conditions still have difficulty taking their health care seriously. I think the reason is that pain is a complex condition that requires a lot of knowledge about how it works. My personal opinion is that pain management requires specialized skills, which is unusual today. She says many patients are hurt because they are met with ignorance.

Currently, Eva Kosik is particularly interested in the role of autoreactive antibodies in fibromyalgia.

-We are investigating whether some patients with fibromyalgia have autoimmune components that cause these disorders of the nervous system. If so, they could be treated with immune-modulating therapies, she says.

In the episode, she also says that fibromyalgia has a 70 percent overlap with an IBS diagnosis (which got its own podcast episode about a year ago).