Painkillers are based on how the individual brain responds to the drug.

According to a new study by Northwestern Medical School and the Chicago Rehabilitation Institute (RIC), scientists have for the first time identified areas of the brain responsible for the "placebo effect" of pain relief, and that "fake therapy" can actually significantly reduce pain in patients.
sugar pill can take away your pain - determining the most effective location for the pain-relief placebo effect can help design more personalized medications for people suffering from chronic pain.
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology developed for the study has the potential to lead the era of personalized pain therapy, making it possible to target painkillers based on how the individual brain responds to drugs.
that the researchers excluded placebo-effected individuals before the trial began, so the finding could lead to more accurate clinical trials.
scientists found a unique brain region in the frontal brain that was identified as a placebo "responder" in one trial and confirmed (95 percent accuracy) in the control group of the second trial.
study was published in PLoS Biology on October 27, 2016 (click on the lower left corner to read the original article). marwan Baliki, a
RIC scientist, said: "Given the huge social impact of chronic pain, the ability to predict placebo responses in people with chronic pain can not only help design personalized drugs, but also enhance the success of clinical trials."
usually use medication to treat a patient's pain, and if a drug doesn't work, the doctor changes the dose or changes the drug.
new technology will allow doctors to see which part of the brain is activated when an individual is in pain and select a specific drug to act on that position," said Apkarian, a professor at the center of the study.
it also provides a more evidence-based approach.
doctors were able to measure how a patient's pain area was affected by the drug.
, placebo responses are mainly studied in healthy individuals who control experimental settings.
these experiments help to understand the biological and behavioral basis of placebo responses in experimental pain, they are difficult to translate into clinical because clinical pain is natural.
In the new study, scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in conjunction with a standard clinical trial design to obtain an unethical brain-based neural marker to predict predictive pain loss associated with placebo therapy in patients with chronic knee arthritis pain.
found that placebo drug intake was associated with strong analgesic effects, with more than half of patients reporting pain reduction.
If optimal treatment options based on brain predictiveness can be further expanded and ultimately made available in similar studies in the future, it will significantly reduce patients' access to unnecessary and ineffective treatment and reduce the duration and severity of pain and opioid use."
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