Pain is a messenger, come to tell us something\u2019s wrong, but it speaks louder to some people than others. Erin Young wants to know why.<\/p>\n
Whether she\u2019s listening to a colleague discuss a patient\u2019s unusual reaction to medication at the Center for Advancement in Managing Pain<\/a> (CAMP) in UConn\u2019s School of Nursing, or poring over gene expression data\u00a0in her lab at UConn Health\u2019s Cell and Genome Sciences Building<\/a>, she always wonders. Why does this person feel so much pain? Why does this other person not?<\/p>\n A messenger is only as good as the information it carries. Pain from the densely nerved skin shrieks GPS coordinates as precise as a pinprick, while the sparsely nerved viscera merely mumble. And sometimes the messenger cries wolf, claiming injury or illness where none is apparent.<\/p>\n \u201cThe pain seems to be a living, breathing thing of its own,\u201d in these cases, Young says.<\/p>\n Many healthcare practitioners\u00a0are trained to regard pain as being important only as an indicator of how successful treatment is. If a patient\u2019s cancer is in remission but they still have pain, well, that doesn\u2019t fit into the paradigm. If the patient is fully recovered but has lifelong pain stemming from the surgery that cured them, well, some things can\u2019t be helped. But nurses tend to approach pain differently. If it affects a patient\u2019s quality of life, a nurse will want to alleviate it. Young is a pain geneticist, not a nurse, but her position in CAMP and the School of Nursing<\/a> lets her work in collaboration with nurses all the time. It\u2019s a good fit.<\/p>\n Nurses believe that when the pain is not dependent on an illness \u2013 when it persists, even if a patient appears healthy \u2013 that\u2019s when you have to find and treat the fundamental mechanism. And our DNA is perhaps the most fundamental mechanism of all. Young tries to relate small variations in our DNA to how much we hurt.<\/p>\n She\u2019s found, for example, that depending on the genetic variant you carry, bee stings might feel excruciating or might just make you numb. Other pain-related genes she\u2019s identified could explain why some women find the lifelong chest pain after a mastectomy so terrible they claim they\u2019d rather have died of breast cancer. And she\u2019s found genetic hints that might explain irritable bowel syndrome, which is by definition pain in the abdomen with no obvious cause.<\/p>\n