Study finds love is a potent painkiller

According to researchers, strong feelings of love fired by looking at the picture of a loved one triggers the release of the body’s own painkillers.

This implies that people who are lonely and depressed have a very low threshold of pain whereas those who are loved and secure have a high tolerance for pain.

Senior author of the study, Dr Sean Mackey, chief of the Division of Pain Management associate professor of anesthesia at Stanford University California, stated, “When people are in this passionate, all-consuming phase of love, there are significant alterations in their mood that are impacting their experience of pain.

“We're beginning to tease apart some of these reward systems in the brain and how they influence pain. These are very deep, old systems in our brain that involve dopamine — a primary neurotransmitter that influences mood, reward and motivation.”

Brain-imaging study of love and pain
Researchers recruited 15 lovesick enraptured students in the first nine months of a romantic relationship for a brain-imaging study of love and pain.

All were asked to bring snaps of their beloved and a fairly attractive person known to them.

As a part of the study, the researchers showed the photographs, either of the beloved or the acquaintance to the participants in succession while a hot probe was pressed into the palms of their left hand to simulate mild doses of pain.

Simultaneously the students had their brains scanned to measure how much pain they felt.

Distraction also alters pain
In another experiment, the researchers measured the student’s response to pain while they were distracted with mental word-association games. Distractions have previously been known to alleviate pain.

They found that both love and mental distractions were able to lower the perception of pain by the same amount but the focus on an attractive friend's photo had no such effect.

However, it was noticed that love and mental distraction used completely different regions of the brain to lessen pain.

While distraction relied on cognitive pathways, feelings of love caused more activity in the reward center of the brain that is triggered by morphine and cocaine.

Study author Jarred Younger, an assistant professor in pain management at Stanford stated, “With the distraction test the brain pathways leading to pain relief were mostly cognitive. The reduction of pain was associated with higher, cortical parts of the brain.

"Love-induced analgesia is much more associated with the reward centres. It appears to involve more primitive aspects of the brain, activating deep structures that may block pain at a spinal level - similar to how illegal drugs work."

The findings were published on Wednesday in the Public Library of Science journal 'PLoS One.'