New research overturns the widespread notion that humans, unlike other mammals, process pain more slowly than touch. The findings may have significant implications for the diagnosis and treatment of pain.

Share on Pinterest Pain signals may travel just as quickly as touch signals in humans, new research suggests.

Until now, the scientific consensus has been that in humans, the nerve signals that “communicate” touch to the brain are faster than those that relay pain.

This difference in speed, researchers believed, was due to the fact that touch signals travel through nerves with a thick coat of myelin — the insulating layer of lipids that forms a protective sheath around the nerves. Myelin helps the nerves conduct signals more quickly.

In contrast, pain signals travel through nerves that either do not have myelin at all or have only a very thin layer.

Other mammals have so-called ultrafast nociceptors (receptors that detect damaging or potentially damaging stimuli), that is, afferent neurons with a thick coat of myelin to convey pain signals as fast as possible. But, is the same true for humans?

Saad Nagi, a principal research engineer in the Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine and the Center for Social and Affective Neuroscience at Linköping University in Sweden, recently led a team of researchers looking to answer this question.

“The ability to feel pain is vital to our survival,” explains Nagi, “so why should our pain-signaling system be so much slower than the system used for touch and so much slower than it could be?”

To find out, the scientists applied a technique called microneurography, which allowed them to visualize and track the neural traffic from “peripheral nerves leading to muscle and skin.”

Nagi and team applied this technique to 100 healthy study participants and published the findings in the journal Science Advances.