Sources of Individual Differences in Pain
- 8 July 2021
- journal article
- review article
- Published by Annual Reviews in Annual Review of Neuroscience
- Vol. 44 (1), 1-25
- https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-neuro-092820-105941
Abstract
Pain is an immense clinical and societal challenge, and the key to understanding and treating it is variability. Robust interindividual differences are consistently observed in pain sensitivity, susceptibility to developing painful disorders, and response to analgesic manipulations. This review examines the causes of this variability, including both organismic and environmental sources. Chronic pain development is a textbook example of a gene-environment interaction, requiring both chance initiating events (e.g., trauma, infection) and more immutable risk factors. The focus is on genetic factors, since twin studies have determined that a plurality of the variance likely derives from inherited genetic variants, but sex, age, ethnicity, personality variables, and environmental factors are also considered.Keywords
This publication has 208 references indexed in Scilit:
- Pain modality- and sex-specific effects of COMT genetic functional variantsPain, 2013
- Identification of new susceptibility loci for osteoarthritis (arcOGEN): a genome-wide association studyThe Lancet, 2012
- Genetically determined P2X7 receptor pore formation regulates variability in chronic pain sensitivityNature Medicine, 2012
- Metabolomics implicates altered sphingolipids in chronic pain of neuropathic originNature Chemical Biology, 2012
- Pain sensitivity and vasopressin analgesia are mediated by a gene-sex-environment interactionNature Neuroscience, 2011
- A Variant in MCF2L Is Associated with OsteoarthritisAmerican Journal of Human Genetics, 2011
- Genome-wide association study identifies a locus at 7p15.2 associated with endometriosisNature Genetics, 2010
- TRAF1–C5as a Risk Locus for Rheumatoid Arthritis — A Genomewide StudyThe New England Journal of Medicine, 2007
- Exploring joint effects of genes and the clinical efficacy of morphine for cancer pain: OPRM1 and COMT genePain, 2007
- Candidate-gene approaches for studying complex genetic traits: practical considerationsNature Reviews Genetics, 2002