Sketchy sleep increases pain sensitivity
• • by Paul Ingraham
Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.
Fresh science! Sketchy sleep increases pain sensitivity.
A major driver of chronic pain is sensitization, basically turning up the “volume” on all pain. The phenomenon is well-known, but how it works is still a mystery, and its relationship with sleep has barely been studied. A 2016 experiment looked carefully at 133 patients with knee arthritis, comparing those who slept well versus those who did not. They found, with a high degree of certainty, that:
sleep fragmentation may strongly affect the pain and CS relationship; consequently, these results underscore the importance of considering and treating sleep in patients with chronic pain.”
