PRF News

By now it’s clear: COVID-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, includes symptoms that invoke the nervous system in myriad ways – from the acute symptoms of sore throat, […]

The brains of patients with different chronic pain conditions, including fibromyalgia, often show differences in resting-state functional connectivity, compared to pain-free controls. Researchers have often interpreted this to mean that […]

The American actress Danica McKellar, best known for her role as Winnie Cooper in the hit television series The Wonder Years, once said: “My hope is to go fully natural […]

Meissner corpuscles, receptors for vibration and pressure in the hairless skin of mammals, were first discovered over 165 years ago. However, the function of these structures in touch perception has […]

Editor’s note: Eight young pain researchers were recently selected to provide news articles and other content as part of PRF’s Correspondents program, which provides a science communications training experience. In […]

Even though chronic pain disproportionately affects women, preclinical pain research has relied heavily on data from male rodents. With increasing recognition that males and females process pain differently, some have […]

Nociceptive signals entering the brain via the spinothalamic pathway allow us to detect the location and intensity of a painful sensation. But, at least as importantly, nociceptive inputs also reach […]

General anesthetics used in surgeries are well known to cause loss of consciousness. This has often been assumed to account for the ability of these drugs to also produce analgesia. […]

How the nervous system encodes pain and itch – two distinct percepts – is hotly debated. A new study challenges the long-standing labeled line theory for itch, which argues that […]

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on RELIEF, PRF’s companion website for patients and the wider public, and is being republished here for PRF readers.   On September 3, 2010, […]