Genetics of Pain

Pain is ”an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage” [2]; it is a common problem, not only for patients, but also for the medical world.
Nociceptive pain has a protective role, a signal role, but if the lesions that caused it persist and are excessive, pain becomes a disease (neuropathic pain).
The partial failure of integrated treatment methods, especially in the case of chronic diseases, determined scientists to turn their attention towards the genetic conditioning of individual pain perception and the effectiveness or adverse reactions of painkillers or neuroleptic medication.
The financial aspect of treating pais is also of great importance: there are immense sums of money spent annually to treat pain: 150 billion USD in the USA, and 200 billion EUR in Europe [3]. Other pain-related aspects, such as depression (22%) and the loss of jobs (25%) also have to be considered [3].[More]