As people get older, they experience more aches and pains than they did as children. UF researchers recently helped scientists move toward figuring out the cause.
By selecting patients who were in good health and separated only by age, researchers have discovered humans experience delayed inflammatory responses as they get older.
The result is a feeling of pain that lasts for longer amounts of time, said Joseph Riley, the director of the Pain Clinical Research Unit in the UF Pain Research and Intervention Center of Excellence.
The study is one of the first of its kind in testing the body’s response to pure physical pain via blood testing, as opposed to testing the body’s response to stress. One of the tests administered involved dunking subjects’ feet in ice-cold water. When people feel pain, such as this extreme cold, it’s mostly from inflammation and not from actual injury.
Riley said pain and inflammation are good, but when a reaction is delayed and pain sensors don’t turn off after the initial injury is gone, people feel pain long after the trauma is already healed.
“This is the first step in future studies,” he said.
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