Italian family's inability to feel pain spurs research for chronic patients

Leprosy is the classic disease where the most visible deformities are due to a lack of feeling pain. The mycobacterium is thought to attack the long nerves of the arms and legs, which results in the patients being unable to detect damage - resulting in burns, infections and loss of toes/limbs.

One of the problems of treating chronic pain is that it doesn't just involve pain nerve fibres, but also the cerebral perception of pain. Patients who have had amputations can have a 'phantom limb' syndrome, where it seems the cerebrum has remapped it's input somewhere else. They can also get phantom limb pain - which given there isn't a limb or nerve fibres shows how difficult it can be to treat chronic pain.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3198614/

This jumped out at me:

With 10 percent of the world’s population — more than 60 million people — living with chronic pain...

Its true that 700 million is more than 60 million, so technically its correct but a word way to phrase it...

We’ve come a long way from the 2007 study by Italian nuns on the connection between stress and disease. You know, which I read about at the job I started on March 15th (ref: HELen).