Pain Pathways

Short term (acute) pain is important for alerting an animal to injury, preventing a repeat injury, and promoting healing. But if pain persists long after the initial insult, it can be problematic. Just ask one of the tens of millions of people who live with some form of chronic pain. It was thought that both types of pain were processed through essentially the same neural pathways. But recent research indicates parts of the circuity are separate – as seen in this mouse brain slice where chronic and acute pain neurons are coloured yellow and red respectively. In mice with induced chronic pain, inhibiting the activity of certain neurons could alleviate their chronic pain without affecting their acute pain responses. If novel drugs can be developed for specifically targeting chronic pain pathways, then, like those mice, patients might gain relief from chronic pain without their other senses being dulled.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image courtesy Xiaoke Chen, Stanford University re work by Qian Wang, Joo Han Lee and Gregory Nachtrab, and colleagues
• Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
• Image originally published as 'use credit' equating to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Research published in Nature, April 2026