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In other words, there is a mismatch between a movement and the perception of that movement. “We wanted to see if we could come up with an engineering-based treatment as opposed to a drug-based treatment.”Ī popular theory of the cause of phantom limb pain is faulty ‘wiring’ of the sensorimotor cortex, the part of the brain that is responsible for processing sensory inputs and executing movements. “Even though the hand is gone, people with phantom limb pain still feel like there’s a hand there – it basically feels painful, like a burning or hypersensitive type of pain, and conventional painkillers are ineffective in treating it,” said study co-author Dr Ben Seymour, a neuroscientist based in Cambridge’s Department of Engineering. Between 50 and 80 percent of these patients suffer with chronic pain in the ‘phantom’ hand, known as phantom limb pain. In most cases, individuals who have had a hand or arm amputated, or who have had severe nerve injuries which result in a loss of sensation in their hand, continue to feel the existence of the affected hand as if it were still there.
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The findings could also be applied to those with other forms of chronic pain, including pain due to arthritis.Īpproximately 5,000 amputations are carried out in the UK every year, and those with type 1 or type 2 diabetes are at particular risk of needing an amputation. Their results, reported in the journal Nature Communications, demonstrate that in patients with chronic pain associated with amputation or nerve injury, there are ‘crossed wires’ in the part of the brain associated with sensation and movement, and that by mending that disruption, the pain can be treated. They found that if a patient tried to control the prosthetic by associating the movement with their missing arm, it increased their pain, but training them to associate the movement of the prosthetic with the unaffected hand decreased their pain. The researchers, led by a group from Osaka University in Japan in collaboration with the University of Cambridge, used a brain-machine interface to train a group of ten individuals to control a robotic arm with their brains. Researchers have discovered that a ‘reorganisation’ of the wiring of the brain is the underlying cause of phantom limb pain, which occurs in the vast majority of individuals who have had limbs amputated, and a potential method of treating it which uses artificial intelligence techniques.