What part of your body is the most sensitive?

The forehead and fingertips are the most sensitive parts to pain, according to the first map created by scientists of how the ability to feel pain varies across the human body.

theguardian.com - Forehead and fingertips most sensitive to pain, research shows

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The forehead and fingertips are the most sensitive parts to pain, according to the first map created by scientists of how the ability to feel pain varies across the human body. It is hoped that the study, in which volunteers had pain inflicted without touching them, could help the estimated 10 million people in the UK who suffer from chronic pain by allowing physicians to use lasers to monitor nerve damage across the body. This would offer a quantitative way to monitor the progression or regression of a condition. Lead author Dr Flavia Mancini, of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, said: "Acuity for touch has been known for more than a century, and tested daily in neurology to assess the state of sensory nerves on the body. It is striking that until now nobody had done the same for pain." In the study, a pair of lasers were used to cause brief sensation of pinprick pain to 26 blindfolded healthy volunteers on various parts of their body without any touch, in order to define our ability to identify where it hurts, known as "spatial acuity". Sometimes only one laser would be activated, and sometimes both. The participants were asked whether they felt one sting or two, at varying distances between the two beams and researchers recorded the minimum distance between the beams at which people were able to accurately say whether it was one sting or two. "This measure tells us how precisely people can locate the source of pain on different parts of their body," said senior author Dr Giandomenico Iannetti, of the UCL department of neuroscience, physiology and pharmacology. "Touch and pain are mediated by different sensory systems." The researchers, whose work is published in the journal Annals of Neurology and was funded by the Wellcome Trust, found that with the exception of the hairless skin on the hands, spatial acuity improves towards the centre of the body whereas the acuity for touch is best at the extremities. The spatial pattern was highly consistent across all participants. The experiment was also conducted on a patient who lacked a sense of touch and the results were consistent with those of the healthy volunteers, demonstrating that acuity for pain does not require a functioning sense of touch. Dr Roman Cregg, from the UCL Centre for Anaesthesia, who is a clinical expert who treats patients with chronic pain, said the research had important implications for the assessment of chronic pain, which currently tends to rely on asking patients to subjectively describe their discomfort on a scale of one to 10. "This method offers an exciting, non-invasive way to test the state of pain networks across the body," said Cregg. "Chronic pain is often caused by damaged nerves, but this is incredibly difficult to monitor and to treat. The laser method may enable us to monitor nerve damage across the body, offering a quantitative way to see if a condition is getting better or worse." Work-related back pain is alone estimated to account for 4.9 million days of employee absenteeism, according to the TUC.

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What organs can be lived without?

You'll be surprised as to how much you could lose and still live. You can still have a fairly normal life without one of your lungs, a kidney, your spleen, appendix, gall bladder, adenoids, tonsils, plus some of your lymph nodes, the fibula bones from each leg and six of your ribs.

sciencefocus.com - How many organs in the body could you live without?

Asked by: Alicia Jones, Maidstone

You can still have a fairly normal life without one of your lungs, a kidney, your spleen, appendix, gall bladder, adenoids, tonsils, plus some of your lymph nodes, the fibula bones from each leg and six of your ribs. Losing your uterus, ovaries and breasts, or your testicles and prostate, is also quite survivable, although you might need hormone therapy to avoid other long-term problems, such as brittle bones. If you allow yourself artificial replacements and medication, we can go further and remove your stomach, colon, pancreas, salivary glands, thyroid, bladder and your other kidney. Still not enough for you? Theoretically, surgeons could amputate all of your limbs, and remove your eyes, nose, ears, larynx, tongue, lower spine and rectum. Supported by machines in an intensive care unit, they could also take away your skull, heart and your remaining lung, at least for a short while. This adds up to a theoretically survivable loss of around 45 per cent of your total body mass. But any trauma that destroyed all these organs all at once would almost certainly kill you from shock and blood loss. And surgically removing them one at a time over many months would likely also be fatal, due to infections in your immune-compromised state.