Opioids erase memory traces of pain
Monday, January 16, 2012 - 09:01
in Health & Medicine
A team of researchers at the MedUni Vienna's Department of Neurophysiology (Centre for Brain Research) has discovered a previously unknown effect of opioids: the study, which has now been published in Science and was led by Ruth Drdla-Schutting and Jürgen Sandkühler, shows that opioids not only temporarily relieve pain, but at the right dose can also erase memory traces of pain in the spinal cord and therefore eliminate a key cause of chronic pain.