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Coffee may be an effective pain reliever: Research
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Caffeine and drugs that are used to promote wakefulness, such as modafinil, can successfully numb pain (Shutterstock/File)
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ew research from Nature Medicine has found that coffee has the potential to be an effective painkiller, showing that the drink is more than just a way to wake yourself up in the morning.
Published on May 8, the research explains that sleep deprivation may aggravate the amount of pain people feel, but that caffeine has the potential to ease the discomfort, as quoted by Boston Magazine.
According to the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), the experiment was conducted on mice that were made to stay awake. They were divided into groups of six to 12 mice that were awake for 12 hours in one session or six hours over the course of five days.
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“We found that five consecutive days of moderate sleep deprivation can significantly exacerbate pain sensitivity over time in otherwise healthy mice,” said a sleep physiologist Chloe Alexandre to BIDMC. “The response was specific to pain, and was not due to a state of general hyperexcitability to any stimuli.”
However, popular analgesics like ibuprofen and morphine could not relieve the pain due to sleep loss. Patients who may face the similar experiences with pain are often recommended to increase their dose of these medications, which may also increase the risk of side effects. On the other hand, caffeine and drugs that are used to promote wakefulness, such as modafinil, successfully numbed the pain.
“This represents a new kind of analgesic that hadn’t been considered before, one that depends on the biological state of animal,” stated Clifford Woolf, the director of the F.M. Kirby Neurobiology Center at Boston Children’s, as quoted by BIDMC.
However, further research is still needed for humans, especially to determine how much sleep is needed to decrease pain and whether caffeine is able to ease it. (asw)
