Treating Lower Back Pain Is Good For The Brain

Low back pain, it turns out, often brings some troublesome symptoms that have nothing to do with the lower back. Among them are cognitive impairment, and, less surprisingly, anxiety and depression. So can relieving low back pain fix that too?  A news release from McGill University says the answer is yes. McGill researchers ran MRI scans on people who has suffered from lower back pain for at least six months, then ran more scans after the patients had been treated with either spinal injections or surgery. The university reports that researchers found increased cortical thickness in specific areas of the brain that were related to both pain reduction and physical disability, and the abnormal brain activity observed initially during an attention-demanding cognitive task was found to have normalized after treatment.

Read more from McGill University.