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If anyone is considering this route
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Fukui_Shigemori_Yoshimura.pdf
Interesting hypothoses from this article:
"Our case again suggests that chronic pain patients who are resistant to multiple analgesics may respond
to ECT. Although the mechanism of the analgesic action of ECT is unclear, recent reports suggested
the following potential mechanisms for ECT’s analgesic action:
(1) ECT improves the emotional component in chronic pain patients and the mental state could affect the pain threshold10;
(2) ECT may block a pathologic localized corticothalamic reverberatory loop involved in maintaining
chronic neuropathic pain11;
(3) ECT may activate inhibitory pathways via activation of serotonergic, noradrenergic, and dopamine neurotransmission systems in the brain12;
(4) ECT may inhibit longterm potentiation (LTP), which is involved in a form of synaptic plasticity and pain memory13; and similar to N-methyl-D-aspartic acid receptor antagonists, ECT may inhibit this “wind-up”;
(5) from our brain-SPECT data, it is speculated that ECT increases abnormally decreased thalamus activity in
chronic pain patients."
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