THE PAIN OF IBD

PATIENTS with inflammatory bowel disease — IBD — often suffer from abdominal pain even between flareups, and German scientists wondered if their fear of the pain makes it feel worse.

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"We wanted to test whether IBD patients perceive pain differently than healthy individuals, and whether this is linked to the strength of fear learning," explains Ruhr University Bochum's Dr. Hanna Öhlmann. Her team devised a test comparing how healthy people responded to a painful heat stimuli on two separate days compared to IBD patients.

They found people with IBD perceived the pain as more unpleasant and more intense on the second exposure than healthy participants did.