A new Perspective article was published this week in Nature Reviews Neuroscience by PI Robyn Crook, along with Ben Seymour (Oxford University) and Zhe Sage Chen (NYU), titled “Post-injury pain and behavior: a control theory perspective”. In this Perspective, we propose a control-theoretic framework to explain the adaptive processes in the brain that drive physiological post-injury behavior. We set out an evolutionary and ethological view on how animals respond to injury, illustrating how the behavioral state associated with persistent pain and recuperation may be just as important as phasic pain in ensuring survival.
This provocative and original approach to thinking about chronic and persistent pain as processes arising from natural selection rather than as a disease state, is likely to generate new lines of enquiry and ways of thinking about management of pain in humans and other animals.