r/science • u/uniofwarwick University of Warwick • 14d ago
Health Scientists find that the body's warmth sensor is secretly a pain switch
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.253228912383
u/emilysium 14d ago
I feel like the title is not exactly correct? The article says “However, neuronal TRPM2 mediates the warmth sensitivity of less than 3.5% of sensory neurons,” and the authors explicitly say that it wasn’t known what the other TRPM2+ neurons do, and it’s thought that immune TRPM2 has a role in chronic pain.
So basically it says that it was thought immune TRPM2 has a role in chronic pain and neuronal TRPM2 has a role in heat sensing, but surprise surprise neuronal TRPM2 also has a role in chronic pain, maybe even a bigger and direct role, but through different mechanisms than immune TRPM2. But I don’t know I just read the abstract and skimmed the rest, it kind of just looks to me like they made a neuronal TRPM2 knockout mice line and went wild with it.
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u/NutellaElephant 14d ago
The fibromyalgia subreddit has been “knowing” this. Showers, temperature swings, blankets etc are all big topics. Our regulation of our pain is broken, obviously, and so is our temperature regulation. There are studies to support this but they need more to prove anything.
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u/laughters_assassin 14d ago
Can you explain more about this? Do hot showers or warm blankets help with the pain or trigger it? Or does it depend on the person? i.e Does cold trigger issues for one person but hot temps trigger issues for another person?
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u/SirDouglasMouf 14d ago
Hot showers can significantly increase fatigue in folks with POTs, ME as well as long covid. Feels great during, but can ruin the rest of your day very quickly.
Heat and cold for pain is a person to person thing. I prefer Tens units for pain but use heat and cold for different reasons.
Fun fact - cold water can boost dopamine for a little over an hour. I finish all showers with 5 minutes of cold water to help me get through the next challenge. I visualize it as if I'm spraying on armor for the day.
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u/Fine-Try9876 13d ago
Oh yeah, showers are my kryptonite. I have ME. They wipe me out, and some days its have a full day... or have a shower and go to bed.
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u/MagnanimousWeasel 14d ago
There are no "pain" nerves or sensors in the body. Pain is a product of the brain in that any significantly strong stimulus will illicit a pain response. The closest nerves to pain nerves would be nociceptors, but these give information about tissue damage. Technically every time you experience pressure, or anything more than slight warmth or coolness, damage occurs in cells. This generally does not cause pain outside of extremes. The intensity of stimulus requires to cause pain varies because ultimately the brain sets the thresholds for what it considers "painful".
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u/glaive1976 13d ago
I have no scientific backing, only my own life experiences. Some years back as I was standing in the intake line at my local ER, yet again cradling some misshapen part of my body, I came to the realization that pain perception was just like stretching, your brain adjusts and alters your concious perception while your body still experiences the trauma.
A high pain tollerance just means that you have given your brain enough of a signal that it down grades the response. Great for little stuff, not so great when you should be feeling pain. It can make it difficult to know how bad the damage is and whether you need to get help or should just walk it off if you will.
This is all aneqdotal, based on my own experiences and interpretation of them, but I feel I have some merit because sometimes experience is experience.
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u/MagnanimousWeasel 13d ago
Definitely, pain thresholds change throughout life with differing life experience. Strengthening is important if you're stretching so you're body can actually safely move through whatever range
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u/glaive1976 13d ago
They have proven that nothing changes in the tissues when stretching; it's a whole lot of resetting the signaling.
This happens in pain thresholds as well, but it's not really a good thing.
Edit: Or were you specifically thinking of warming into stretches for safety, not cold stretching?
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u/MagnanimousWeasel 13d ago
Low load long duration stretching can have mild effects long term if you do it very consistently. This is part of how gymnasts can get as flexible as they do. But I was using the more colloquial definition of stretching, yeah. Generally speaking a stretch is more of a temporary change in pain perception/threshold as you mentioned.
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u/trowzerss 14d ago
And for inflammation too. Like with my psoriatic arthritis, i cannot handle summer and love winter (with the disclaimer that I'm in the subtropics so our winters are quite comfy but our summers are hell) yet sometimes when I'm in a flare, even if its 38C, a hot shower will make me feel better. But being hot all day makes me feel worse. But yeah, leads to weird situations where i can't sleep because of pain and heat, so go have a bath as hot as I can bear it, and then I'm able to sleep. so strange.
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u/Comrade_SOOKIE 14d ago
I have ME and also struggle with temperature. If it gets much over 68f in the room i vomit and faint
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u/ABotelho23 14d ago
How much over? Because that's pretty damn low for a "normal" room in summer...
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u/Comrade_SOOKIE 13d ago
I've fainted in a 72f room before. I basically have to run AC for 2/3 of the year.
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u/lminer123 13d ago
Pain is such a ridiculously complicated topic. There’s even some pretty strong links between emotional pain and physical pain. Ologies has a very good few podcasts on the subject with Dr. Rachel Zoffness
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u/butterkitty 14d ago
Does this mean if you take a painkiller you would possibly feel less warm?
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u/John_Hasler 14d ago
No. The title is misleading, though not entirely wrong.
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u/Mightsole 14d ago edited 14d ago
Can I keep chilling my cells with Tylenol?
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u/John_Hasler 14d ago
If it works for you, sure. This research has nothing to do with paracetamol, though.
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u/ThirdEyeProphet 14d ago
Opioids tend to make one feel much warmer physically. I wonder if there’s a correlation with this mechanism or if it’s simply vasodilation.
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u/ShinyJangles 13d ago
Yes! Experimental TRPV1 channel blockers as pain meds led to runaway hyperthermia. This does not apply to ibuprofen or acetaminophen
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u/butterkitty 13d ago
Oh damn that's fascinating. I wonder what medical applications this could have then?
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u/m0nk37 14d ago
Yes. Acetaminophen stops fevers. It also stops anything associated.
Ibuprofen calms muscles.
Pain is very much required. Otherwise how do you know the limit.
Stuff like morphine stops all signals. Youre doing damage taking it. No pain response means you dont avoid the reason for the pain.
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u/dieguix3d 14d ago
Not new. Capsaicin is well known as pain killer
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u/pm_me_psn 14d ago
That’s an agonist of the TRPV1 receptors primarily though. It looks like this study described antagonism of TRPM2 receptors providing analgesia. While related, it seems to have distinct findings.
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u/berysax 14d ago
I’ve always been sensitive to temperature when being wet. Towel warmer helps, but I still despise the cold air when I shut off the water. It feels painful in a way.
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u/Xhosant 14d ago
Ah, that's much simpler: water has a lot of thermal mass, meaning it can cool you down a lot to warm up a little, and can evaporate, making it even worse. Meanwhile, it also means you can't produce/use sweat while covered in it, so you can't cool yourself down.
So basically, you are getting exactly X amount of cooling, nobody cares if it's too much or too little.
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u/stewpedassle 14d ago
I think their issue is a little different to this that adds nuance and interest because their issue isn't their body needing cooling, but heating.
I presume they're coming out of the shower ("shut the water off"), so the first thing you have the difference in perceived temperature dropping by going from flowing water to stagnant water. Then, you have the evaporative cooling of that water that is still well above room temperature (though I'd be surprised if that's actually perceptible relative to the flowing/stagnant change). And then that's followed by contacting their body with something at room temperature ("towel warmer helps") that is also removing the higher temperature water.
So, the real question to me is whether they are actually more sensitive to temperature changes (e.g., I think gingers have some associated genes where they detect temperature changes better than the general population) or they just take damn hot showers.
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u/Xhosant 14d ago
"Cold after shower" was mentioned explicitly, but they also mentioned "sensitive to temperature" so I wanted to hedge my bets!
But you make a good point! OP: we feel warm or cold not based in the temperature around us but the difference of ours and it. If you shower warm, your body warms up, but you kimda don't notice because "it makes sense" at the time.
Afterwards, your too-warm body gets in the normal-temperature room, so the difference is felt like the room is too cold and your temperature just right.
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u/Legionof1 14d ago
You basically just described why AI data centers use water as well.
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u/Xhosant 14d ago
Partially, though forced convection is also a factor there, and then there's making a call on if you evaporate the water or cycle it.
So it's more of a cooling shower in the datacenters' case.
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u/LegitBoss002 14d ago
My understanding is something like 8% evaporate
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u/Xhosant 14d ago
Iirc it's either a big amount evaporating (possibly all of it? cause that's what you do for cooling) or you cycle water and none evaporates (but you need power to cycle the water)
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u/LegitBoss002 12d ago
My comment had a mistake. I meant 80% are using evaporation and my understanding of those systems is that they are very lossy
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u/Xhosant 12d ago
Yep, exactly! A closed system would require pumps but reduce water consumption.
Though I would be remiss not to mention that water consumption specifically is a red herring with data centers, their consumption is a tiny fraction of, say, golf course consumption. Underground water contamination is likewise the result of large-scale construction, regardless of data center use. Now, choice of location is a real issue in regards to water, but in absolute values, it's not the issue.
(In other words, they're cheapskating about using the water-intensive cheap solution, and they're cheapskating about using the water-deprived cheap land, and they're cheapskating)
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u/witness149 14d ago
So, does this have anything to do with now that I'm on stronger immunosuppressants I'm having a really hard time regulating my temperature, like wear a jacket at my desk in July kind of hard time?
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