Our picture of the human body just got a little bit more complete:
The research team discovered this hidden sensory system by studying two unique patients who were diagnosed with a previously unknown abnormality by lead author David Bowsher, M.D., Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Liverpool’s Pain Research Institute. These patients had an extremely rare condition called congenital insensitivity to pain, meaning that they were born with very little ability to feel pain. Other rare individuals with this condition have excessively dry skin, often mutilate themselves accidentally and usually have severe mental handicaps. “Although they had a few accidents over their lifetimes, what made these two patients unique was that they led normal lives. Excessive sweating brought them to the clinic, where we discovered their severe lack of pain sensation,” said Dr. Bowsher. “Curiously, our conventional tests with sensitive instruments revealed that all their skin sensation was severely impaired, including their response to different temperatures and mechanical contact. But, for all intents and purposes, they had adequate sensation for daily living and could tell what is warm and cold, what is touching them, and what is rough and smooth.”
The mystery deepened when Dr. Bowsher sent skin biopsies across the ocean to Dr. Rice’s laboratory, which focuses on multi-molecular microscopic analyses of nerve endings in the skin, especially in relation to chronic pain conditions such as those caused by nerve injuries, diabetes, and shingles. These unique analyses were pioneered by Dr. Rice at Albany Medical College (AMC) along with collaborators at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. “Under normal conditions, the skin contains many different types of nerve endings that distinguish between different temperatures, different types of mechanical contact such as vibrations from a cell phone and movement of hairs, and, importantly, painful stimuli,” said Dr. Rice. “Much to our surprise, the skin we received from England lacked all the nerve endings that we normally associated with skin sensation. So how were these individuals feeling anything?”
If this leads to treatments for poorly understood conditions like fibromyalgia and migraine headaches, it’ll be fantastic, but mostly it’s just astonishing that something like this could be right there in our own bodies and we’ve missed it for so long.
Great article – this may explain why I’ve broken all my toes several times, with very little pain, really. The one time I broke a toe and cut it to the bone, I set it myself and wrapped it up…and then finished Thanksgiving dinner prep. I’ve also got fibro and RA, so maybe the pain that was supposed to be in my toes just floats around.