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Dr. Laura Stone: Chronic pain alters DNA marking in the brain

Published: 19 February 2013

The team led by Prof. Laura Stone, a professor at the Faculty of Dentistry and the Alan Edwards Centre for Research on Pain, and Prof. Moshe Szyf, a professor at the Faculty of Medicine’s Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, have discovered a mechanism that embeds the memory of an injury in the way the DNA is marked in the brain by a chemical coating called methyl groups or DNA methylation. The researchers including co-authors Maral Tajerian, Sebastian Alvarado, Magali Millecamps, Pascal Vachon, Cecilia Crosby, and Catherine Bushnell report in the journal PLOS One, that if the symptoms of chronic pain are attenuated, the abnormal changes in DNA methylation could be reversed.

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