ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2019
An evolutionary medicine perspective on pain and its disorders.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Common and specific large-scale brain changes in major depressive disorder, anxiety disorders, and chronic pain: a transdiagnostic multimodal meta-analysis of structural and functional MRI studies.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2022Pooled it
- Cross-cultural evidence that shame is a defense against reputational damage.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- On the topical issue of assisted dying: the insurmountable challenges of human existence, and the right to exit.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
- Wild strains reveal natural variation in C. elegans avoidance behaviors.G3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2025Article
- The DCIDE framework: systematic investigation of evolutionary hypotheses, exemplified with autism.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Article
- Ratio of excitatory and inhibitory synaptic processes in periaqueductal gray matter of the brain activated by the raphe magnus nucleus in a model of Parkinson's disease with hydrocortisone protection.The Korean journal of pain · 2025Article
- Neuroimmune Pain and Its Manipulation by Pathogens.Evolutionary applications · 2025Article
- Contemporary small-scale subsistence populations offer unique insights into human musculoskeletal health and aging.Science advances · 2024Review
- I Feel! Therefore, I Am from Pain to Consciousness in DOC Patients.International journal of molecular sciences · 2023Review
- Impact and centrality of attention dysregulation on cognition, anxiety, and low mood in adolescents.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Evolutionary psychiatry: foundations, progress and challenges.World psychiatry : official journal of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) · 2023Article
- Labour's pain: strenuous subsistence work, mechanical wear-and-tear and musculoskeletal pain in a non-industrialized population.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Chloride-dependent mechanisms of multimodal sensory discrimination and nociceptive sensitization ineLife · 2023Article
- The influence of cultural and religious factors on cross-national variations in the prevalence of chronic back and neck pain: an analysis of data from the global burden of disease 2019 study.Frontiers in pain research (Lausanne, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Exaptation and Evolutionary Adaptation in Nociceptor Mechanisms Driving Persistent Pain.Brain, behavior and evolution · 2023Review
- Pain: Behavioural expression and response in an evolutionary framework.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2023Article
- Differential behavioral response to predator odor in neuropathic pain in mice.Frontiers in pain research (Lausanne, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- The Consciousness of Pain: A Thalamocortical Perspective.NeuroSci · 2022Article
- Painful Truth: The Need to Re-Center Chronic Pain on the Functional Role of Pain.Journal of pain research · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Enormous progress in understanding the mechanisms that mediate pain can be augmented by an evolutionary medicine perspective on how the capacity for pain gives selective advantages, the trade-offs that shaped the mechanisms, and evolutionary explanations for the system's vulnerability to excessive and chronic pain. Syndromes of deficient pain document tragically the utility of pain to motivate escape from and avoidance of situations causing tissue damage. Much apparently excessive pain is actually normal because the cost of more pain is often vastly less than the cost of too little pain (the smoke detector principle). Vulnerability to pathological pain may be explained in part because natural selection has shaped mechanisms that respond adaptively to repeated tissue damage by decreasing the pain threshold and increasing pain salience. The other half of an evolutionary approach describes the phylogeny of pain mechanisms; the apparent independence of different kinds of pain is of special interest. Painful mental states such as anxiety, guilt and low mood may have evolved from physical pain precursors. Preliminary evidence for this is found in anatomic and genetic data. Such insights from evolutionary medicine may help in understanding vulnerability to chronic pain. This article is part of the Theo Murphy meeting issue 'Evolution of mechanisms and behaviour important for pain'.
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