All pain involves nerves. Nerves transmit information from receptors in your skin or tissues to your brain. Though nobody likes pain, it is an adaptive mechanism that evolved to alert your brain and body when tissues are under assault of some sort. The body then rallies various protective mechanisms, including your attention. But nerve pain more specifically refers to a type of pain that occurs as a result of chronic pain or other conditions that trigger painful sensations above and beyond that caused by assault of tissue at a particular site. Fish oil might help ease nerve pain, as well as pain associated with inflammatory processes.
Nerve Pain
Nerve pain, also called neuralgia, is pain that follows the pathway of the nerve. It has myriad causes, but often the cause is unknown. Sometimes a primary external agent or cause at a particular site along the nerve pathway can be identified. Chemicals, inflammation, compression of tissues, tissue damage from accident or surgery and tumors all can cause nerve pain. One common form of nerve pain, trigeminal neuralgia, results from inflammation of the trigeminal nerve, which causes discomfort in the face and surface of the eye. Other forms of neuralgia are triggered by specific diseases or conditions, such as shingles, herpes, infectious diseases such as Lyme disease and syphilis and diabetes.
Inflammation and Nerve Pain
Inflammatory responses contribute to nerve pain. When you body detects assault from an external agent, it invokes chemical responses that involve the white blood cells, which help to rid the body of the invaders. Sometimes the body's inflammatory response is too strong, or the body erroneously responds as if there were substances when there aren't. The body's own protective immune response ends up causing more pain, discomfort and sometimes tissue trauma than the actual agent. Inflammation contributes significantly to the experience of pain during neuralgia and other pain disorders.
Inflammation and Fish Oil
Fish oil contains several fatty acids, including the omega-3 fatty acids docosahexaenoic acid, or DHA, and eicosapentaenoic acid, or EPA. DHA and EPA suppress inflammatory responses of your body. Americans tend to have diets filled with foods that contain omega-6 fatty acids, including vegetables oils made from safflower seeds, cottonseed, corn and soybeans. Omega-6 fatty acids promote inflammatory responses. Though omega-6 fatty acids are important and necessary, the Western diet creates an imbalance of pro-inflammatory versus anti-inflammatory tendencies in your body. We eat as much as 30 times more omega-6 than omega-3 fatty acids, heightening our inclination toward over-reactive inflammatory responses.
Fish Oil and Inflammatory Pain
University of Pittsburgh Medical Center neurologist Joseph Maroon reports that fish oil supplements reduce the perception of pain. Patients in Maroon's study took 1,200 mg of EPA and DHA per day, and after 75 days, nearly 60 percent of the participants stopped taking anti-inflammatory medications for pain. Almost 90 percent of the subjects indicated they were going to continue taking the fish oil to manage their pain.
Fish Oil and Neuropathic Pain
Neuralgia often develops into a condition called neuropathic pain. When neuralgia becomes chronic, it can cause deterioration of the myelin sheath that surrounds and insulates pain nerves. Then, like an electrical circuit with exposed wiring, nerves that shouldn't be communicating directly with each other cross paths and create a feedback loop that perpetuates pain. Dr. Gorgon Ko describes several case studies of chronic pain in the February 2010 "Clinical Journal of Pain." Five patients with neuropathic pain experienced enduring relief by consuming high dosages of EPA and DHA. Dosages of 2,400 to 7,200 mg per day contributed to improvements that were sustained for as long as 19 months.
References
- "Clinical Nutrition Insights"; Understanding the Natural Management of Pain and Inflammation; Mark Percival; April 1999
- MedHelp.org: Neuralgia
- Health Communities.com: Chronic Pain Overview
- "Surgical Neurology"; Omega-3 Fatty Acids (Fish Oil) as an Anti-Inflammatory: An Alternative to Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs for Discogenic Pain; Joseph Maroon, et al.; April 2006
- "The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition"; Essential Fatty Acids in Health and Chronic Disease; Artemis Simonpoulos; September 1999
- "The Clinical Journal of Pain"; Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Neuropathic Pain: Case Series; Gordon Ko, et al.; February 2010
