Researchers with the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center are finding out more about the link between chronic pain and opioid use disorders.

“Among folks with opioid use disorder, chronic pain is pretty high,” said Dr. O. Trent Hall, the author of a recent study in this area.

Hall and his team looked into central sensitization in people living with an opioid use disorder.

“Central sensitization can be explained as abnormal pain processing in the spinal cord and brain,” said Hall. “And what that does is amplifies pain in the same way that a megaphone amplifies a person’s voice.”

That amplified pain can be debilitating, and about two-thirds of people receiving treatment for an opioid use disorder experiencing pain, Hall said. He also noted that pain can lead to using drugs again.

“Pain is a very potent trigger for relapse,” Hall said. “And we know in the news every day we see more and more people dying from fentanyl overdose, and in the age of fentanyl, a single relapse can be deadly.”

This new knowledge can help medical professionals better treat those living with these health problems, and Hall hopes it leads to doctors taking the pain of their patients seriously.

“Our medicines for opioid use disorder all work on the pain pathways in different ways that may be more or less beneficial to people with central sensitization,” he said. We also hope that it will be a new way of talking about pain and understanding that the pain of patients with opioid use disorder is real.”