The brain may feel other people's pain

Using an imaging technique called functional MRI, UK researchers found evidence that people who say they feel vicarious pain do, in fact, have heightened activity in pain-sensing brain regions upon witnessing another person being hurt.
The findings, published in the journal Pain, could have implications for understanding, and possibly treating, cases of unexplained "functional" pain.
"Patients with functional pain experience pain in the absence of an obvious disease or injury to explain their pain," explained Dr. Stuart W. G. Derbyshire of the University of Birmingham, one of the researchers on the new study.
"Consequently," he told Reuters Health in an email, "there is considerable effort to uncover other ways in which the pain might be generated."
Derbyshire said he now wants to study whether the brains of patients with functional pain respond to images of injury in the same way that the current study participants' did.
For the study, Derbyshire and colleague Jody Osborn first had 108 college students view several images of painful situations -- including athletes suffering sports injuries and patients receiving an injection. Close to one-third of the students said that, for at least one image, they not only had an emotional reaction, but also fleetingly felt pain in the same site as the injury in the image.
Derbyshire and Osborn then took functional MRI scans of 10 of these "responders," along with 10 "non-responders" who reported no pain while viewing the images; Kazinform cites China Daily.
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