Authors: Qarni Bilal, Agarwal Meenal, Gupta Mayank, Knezevic Nebojsa Nick, Abd-Elsayed Alaa.
Chronic pain impacts up to 50 million Americans yearly, where hundreds of billions of dollars are spent annually treating pain. The burden on health care systems and patients emphasizes our need to further investigate chronic pain. In recent years, the advent of advanced genome sequencing technologies has enabled us to identify variations in genomic regions which might contribute to susceptibility to pain as well as individuals’ response to treatment. The purpose of this review is to better understand the complex and multifactorial pathophysiology of chronic pain. A deeper understanding of the genetics of chronic pain could have wide implications in the diagnosis of pain pathologies as well as pain management therapy.
Methods: This review conducted a literature analysis on the genetics of chronic pain. The PubMed® search engine was used to research key words “chronic pain”, “pain management”, “pharmacogenomics”, “gene therapy”, and “individualized medicine”. This paper’s research focused on investigating studies that conducted hypothesis-free genetic studies and genome-wide association studies (GWAS). Data from our literature search was compiled into this review and analyzed to discuss strengths and weaknesses of the current literature, and to discuss future avenues of research.
Results: Many gene loci and mutations were identified as being associated with chronic pain pathologies. Results from pertinent genetic studies as well as online gene databases were compared to one another to isolate significant associations between genetics, pharmacogenomics, and pain management therapy.
Discussion: When reviewing the literature searches, we found that although individual studies found significant associations between specific genes and chronic pain pathologies, the results from these studies were unable to be replicated on a larger scale. The genetic data associated with chronic pain has yet to be replicated consistently in different studies on subjects of different ethnicities, geographical distributions, and socioeconomic statuses. Further research into the genetics of chronic pain is needed to make generalizable conclusions and implement them in clinical practice.