Living with pain every day of every week can take its toll on any person, but it's not just the constant effect of suffering. Scientists have compared brain patterns of healthy, pain-free test subjects to those of individuals who experience aching all the time. What they found is that suffering all day could adversely alter the wiring of their brains.

When a person is hurting, their brain constantly fires neurons that it would otherwise shut down when doing simple tasks like making a decision. So someone in chronic pain has this effect every day. In other words, the neurons fail to "quiet down."

Researchers argue that this constant firing of connections could permanently damage their wiring. If these areas don't shut down properly, the brain can't keep itself in equilibrium. Thus other problems like sleep and depression set in. Hopefully they can use this research to better treat chronic pain suffers in the future -- perhaps finding a way to medically quiet the neurons!