One in five Canadians suffers from chronic pain. Not every patient responds to medication the same way and some don’t respond at all. Renowned pain genetics researcher Luda Diatchenko is working on personalizing treatment for each sufferer.
Imagine touching a stove burner and turning it on. How long would it take you to feel pain? Depends on your genes, says Dr. Luda Diatchenko, Canada Excellence Research Chair in Human Pain Genetics at McGill University.
“Half of our pain sensitivity is determined by our genetic makeup,” explains Diatchenko, who joined McGill and its Alan Edwards Centre for Research on Pain in 2013.
A decade ago, Diatchenko performed similar pain-sensitivity tests on 202 healthy female volunteers at the University of North Carolina (UNC). Researchers pressed a small metal cylinder against the skin of the volunteers, heating it mildly to determine the tolerance of the subject and then delivering pulses of heat at a slightly lower temperature. The results led Diatchenko to uncover a key genetic clue to why some people withstand high levels of pain while others suffer intensely.
Diatchenko discovered women who felt heat more quickly and experienced more pain with each additional pulse carried a variant of the COMT gene, which produces an enzyme that controls stress hormones by metabolizing them. This high-pain sensitivity (HPS) variant amplifies pain because it produces less of the COMT enzyme, leading to an excess of non-metabolized stress hormones. Carriers of the HPS variant are also more likely to develop chronic pain conditions, such as fibromyalgia (characterized by widespread musculoskeletal aches and stiffness) and temporomandibular joint disorder (a facial muscle pain condition), which affect about 10 per cent of Canadians.
This finding was exciting because it was the first time a researcher showed an association between a common genetic marker and substantially different experiences of pain
Diatchenko’s goal today is to map other genetic mechanisms at the roots of chronic pain to help develop more effective personalized pain therapy for common conditions like lower back pain, tension headaches and arthritis.
“Pain is the number one reason why people see doctors, and the economic costs to society are greater than the costs of cancer, diabetes and heart disease combined,” she says. “Clinicians want to know what medication will be best for each patient and we want to give them the tools to tailor treatment to the patient’s genetic profile.”
One avenue Diatchenko is exploring is treating pain with beta blockers (proteins that bind to stress hormones, thereby weakening their effects), a class of drugs commonly used to manage heart disease. In a 2010 study, Diatchenko showed that chronic pain patients carrying the HPS variant got more pain relief from the beta blocker propranolol than those with other variants of the COMT gene. Now, she plans to test another beta blocker that she says targets the pain receptors better and has fewer side effects. Propranolol’s side effects include drowsiness and depression.