Acute pain eventually leads to chronic pain. The condition highly affects patients suffering from the physical trauma of tissue damage caused due to an injury or surgery. It is a massive health problem known to affect around 1.5 billion people globally. The problem with chronic pain is that it can exist long after tissue healing is done. Further, it is often resistant to therapy and remains primarily undertreated. Currently available treatments for chronic pain involve analgesic drug classes which lose their effectiveness with time or even lead to addiction. The most significant factor while considering chronic pain is nerve damage. However, the underlying molecular events that cause the situation are yet to be adequately examined and require more extensive research. To this extent, patients with chronic pain do not have many remedies at their disposal, immensely affecting their life quality.
New research might soon be able to help patients suffering from chronic pain. The recently published study has demonstrated that signaling NAAA (N-acylethanolamine acid amidase) inside the spinal cord of male and female mice within 72 hours right after they underwent peripheral injury could stop chronic pain. NAAA is an intracellular enzyme and plays a lead role in halting the development of chronic pain within mice, as per a new study. The findings are first-of-its-kind and may help boost Disease-Modifying Medicines Market by specifying the particular molecular framework responsible for controlling pain transitions from acute to chronic. Further, the mechanism identified could also be beneficial for targeting disease-modifying medicines.
To find control nodes in the process that can be targeted by new classes of disease-modifying medications beyond analgesics, researchers must first define the nature, localization, and timing of the processes involved in pain chronicity.
Researchers have identified that NAAA can be efficiently targeted through small-molecule therapeutics that can inhibit the enzyme for the first time. Furthermore, they are also capable of blocking the conversion of pain from acute to chronic as well.
The findings presented that a new class of drugs, i.e., NAAA inhibitors, could successfully treat different types of chronic pain. Moreover, they also have the potential to be helpful for the prevention of inflammatory and incisional injuries. Till now, no research work has been able to recognize this control node. Thus, the study has made an enormous leap in the sector of chronic pain treatment.
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