Scientists have finally hung the bell on the cat. SCI patients are messed up emotionally. Of course, compared to the SCI plus CP patients, they look pretty good, as a general rule.
There is hardly a day which passes without a Central pain subject telling us that they are not the same emotionally. We had long ceased questioning this. However, we were not prepared for the findings of Nicotra et al from the St. Mary’s of the Imperial College in London who published in the Dec 5 Brain 2005 the rather stunning finding that spinal cord injury alone alters emotion.
Emotions are integrated with the autonomic nervous system. An example might be what Greg Noll described as feeling like your testicles were in your stomach when you first try to ride Waimea big waves. (Greg Noll is famous for first conquering Waimea, one of the legendary surfing wonders of the world, which can be occasionally unrideable when a big storm comes in from the North Pacific).
What the British researchers found, using functional MRI was that normals and SCI patients have enhanced activity in the dorsal anterior cingulum, the right insula, and the medial temporal lobe. SCI patients have diminished responses to an administered painful shock in the dorsal anterior cingulum, the periaqueductal gray, and the superior temporal gyrus. In addition the SCI patients showed REDUCED activity after conditioned painful shock in the subgenual cingulum (ie. beneath the flexion of the cingulum), in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (important area for emotion) and in the posterior cingulate cortex. (Get out your neuroanatomy text or you will find this all sort of confusing)
The authors concluded that SCI patients are probably ALL deficient in emotions, or should we say defective. The authors termed this deficiency an “underlying affective vulnerability”. Those of us with Central Pain have no doubt of the truth of these claims, but we do wonder why some of us have burning pain and are not just emotionally vulnerable. As for the vulnerability being “underlying”, we take issue. It is there in our minds constantly. It is us.
