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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2023 Aug 29.
Published in final edited form as: Nat Rev Neurosci. 2023 May 10;24(6):378–392. doi: 10.1038/s41583-023-00699-5

FIGURE 4. Information restriction model of chronic pain.

FIGURE 4.

a) Illustration of pain through a timeline from injury through to recovery. The solid line reflects the normal, adaptive profile of pain; whereas the dashed line reflects the transition to chronic pain, mediated (at least partially, since there are other factors involved in chronic pain) by various mechanisms of information restriction.

b) Illustration of the four key mechanisms that seed information restriction, which effectively reduces the ability of the brain to recognize that an injury has resolved. This results in an internal model of a peripheral injury that is persistent, and which also continues to drive the physiological and behavioural responses appropriate to a state of true injury. We frame these mechanisms as ‘maladaptive’ to emphasize that the nature of the mechanism, when ‘ill-tuned’, leads to a sub-optimal outcome.