Spontaneous pain arises suddenly, without a clear trigger, and can feel like shooting, stabbing, burning, or electric shocks. It’s a common issue for people who have chronic pain and, because it lacks an external stimulus, difficult to treat. In a study published November 8 in Neuron, researchers link spontaneous pain in mice to coordinated firing of nonadjacent neurons in the dorsal root ganglia (DRG), which are collections of sensory neuron cell bodies just outside the spinal cord. The study authors report that this so-called cluster firing is driven by abnormal sprouting of sympathetic nerves into the DRG, which happens after injury.
“These paroxysms of spontaneous pain can really be debilitating. Because they’re totally unpredictable, there’s nothing a person can do to avoid them, so they cause enormous suffering and anxiety,” says Edgar Walters, who studies chronic pain at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and did not ...
