Skip to main content

No faking! Doctors can now objectively measure how much pain you’re in

When it comes to a person’s levels of intoxication, breathalyzers have been in use for many years, providing a way to take a subjective judgment and make it more scientifically accurate. But what about the equivalent test for gauging a person’s pain levels? Such a tool could be incredibly useful when it comes to helping physicians accurately measure the severity of a patient’s pain levels — and be able to better hone treatment as a result.

There has thus far been no way of doing this. Instead, clinicians have had to rely on patients self-reporting this information. Not only is this subjective, but it is also open to possible abuse. Fortunately, new work from researchers at Indiana University School of Medicine could change things forever. They have discovered biomarkers in blood that can make objective determinations about exactly how much pain a person is in.

“These biomarkers can be used to identify who is at risk of future pain episodes, and intervene early to prevent such episodes,” Indiana University psychiatry professor Alexander Niculescu told Digital Trends. “They can also be used to precisely match patients to medications that they would respond to. Last but not least, they provide an objective readout for pain, and a way of measuring response to treatment. For an individual already in pain, they do not need biomarkers to tell them they are suffering — but they need biomarkers to precisely match them with the best treatment. It also provides objective proof that it is not all in their head; they are not making it up. When the biomarkers are improving with treatment, it provides hope.”

One potentially transformative application of the work could be to help counter the opioid epidemic in North America. Instead of over-prescribing opioids, future physicians will be able to match up the biomarkers in a patient’s blood to all available treatment options. The goal would be to find the compound best able to normalize a particular pain signature, whether that be existing medications or natural alternatives.

“We would like to conduct more extensive studies, in larger populations, to establish normative levels of these biomarkers in different subpopulations, with different diagnoses, and which medications should be used for those subpopulations,” Niculescu continued. “Already in our initial work, we are seeing gender differences. We hope to attract philanthropy and grants to accelerate this research, and commercial partnerships to move it into clinical practice, as well as with pharma companies to accelerated drug development. We want everything to be done using the highest standards, with FDA approval — and all that takes time and money.”

A paper describing the research was recently published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

Editors' Recommendations

Luke Dormehl
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more