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Pioneering study reveals association of chronic pain and broad epigenetic changes.



The team led by Prof. Laura Stone, a professor at the Faculty of Dentistry and the Alan Edwards Centre for Research on Pain, and Prof. Moshe Szyf, a professor at the Faculty of Medicine’s Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, have discovered a mechanism that embeds the memory of an injury in the way the DNA is marked in the brain by a chemical coating called methyl groups or DNA methylation. The researchers including co-authors Maral Tajerian, Sebastian Alvarado, Magali Millecamps, Pascal Vachon, Cecilia Crosby, and

Catherine Bushnell report in the journal PLOS One, that if the symptoms of chronic pain are attenuated, the abnormal changes in DNA methylation could be reversed.

Research pioneered at McGill has previously shown that experiences and not solely chemicals alter the way genes are marked epigenetically, impacting our behavior and well-being. DNA methylation, an epigenetic mark on the gene itself, can therefore serve as a “memory” of an experience that will alter the way the gene functions long after the original experience is gone. The crucial difference between “genetic” and “epigenetic” causes for disease is that genetic changes are inherited and fixed, while epigenetic changes in contrast are possibly reversible.

The McGill research is the first to link chronic pain to genome-wide epigenetic changes in the brain. "Injury results in long-term changes to the DNA markings in the brain; our work shows it might be possible to reverse the effects of chronic pain by interventions using either behavioral or pharmacological means that interfere with DNA methylation, says Prof. Szyf. ”Our findings have the potential to completely alter the way we treat chronic pain.”

In this study, the researchers show that behavioral interventions that reverse chronic pain also remove differences in DNA methylation in the brain.