Media release

From: South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI)

An Adelaide-based research collaboration has identified the specific nerve pathways responsible for relaying pain signals from the bowel to the brain, paving the way for new irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) treatments.

Around 12% of Australians currently live with chronic pain related to IBS or IBD, conditions that cause nerves in the gut to become overactive or hypersensitive. Despite the prevalence of these conditions, therapy options remain scarce.

Recently published in the Journal of Neurochemistry, the SAHMRI-led study was a joint effort involving researchers from the University of Adelaide, the University of Melbourne and Flinders University.

Lead author, Dr Andrea Harrington, says the findings revealed two distinct neural pathways in the spinal cord that act as “gatekeepers” in transmitting pain from the colon and rectum into the brainstem.

“We’ve discovered that the sensory information from the colorectum is transmitted into the brainstem through two distinct regions of the spinal cord,” Dr Harrington said.

“One region in the thoracolumbar spinal cord was shown to relay noxious information into brainstem pain-related circuits, while the other spinal region in the lumbosacral spinal cord carried a broader range of signals into brainstem circuits involved in normal gut motor function and pain modulation.”

“By pinpointing these pathways, we now know how signals from the gut are being transferred and processed in the nervous system appropriately, giving us a clear guide of what neural pathways to target to help understand and manage abnormal pain.”

The study was made possible by world-class imaging support from Adelaide Microscopy at the University of Adelaide, and histology services that enabled the team to visualise these pathways in unprecedented detail.

Building on this discovery, researchers will now investigate how these pathways are altered in IBS and IBD, with the aim of then discovering new therapies to target the faulty pathways directly.