Congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP), is extraordinarily rare conditions in which a person cannot feel physical pain..
Feeling physical pain is vital for survival.
CIP is an extremely dangerous condition, with people with the condition to die in childhood due to injuries or illnesses going unnoticed.
Burn injuries are among the more common injuries.
Cognition and sensation are otherwise normal; for instance, patients can still feel discriminative touch and there are generally no detectable physical abnormalities.
Children with this condition often have oral cavity damage, bitting off the tip of their tongue, fractures to bones, unnoticed infections and corneal damage due to foreign objects in the eye.
There two types of non-response.
Insensitivity to pain means that the painful stimulus is not even perceived.
Indifference to pain means that the patient can perceive the stimulus, but lacks an appropriate response: they do not flinch or withdraw when exposed to pain.
Causes-increased production of endorphins in the brain.
This disorder can be in the voltage-gated sodium channel SCN9A.
Patients with such mutations are congenitally insensitive to pain and lack other neuropathies.
It expected that a loss of function mutation in SCN9A leads to abolished nociceptive pain propagation.
People with homozygous mutations of the PRDM12 gene experience congenital insensitivity to pain.
Another gene implicated in human pain insensitivity is ZFHX2, which encodes zinc finger homeobox 2.
Developmental disabilities such as autism can include varying degrees of pain insensitivity as a sign.
Opioid antagonists like naloxone and naltrexone may be effective in treating the condition.
It has been estimated to have a worldwide incidence of approximately 1 in every 125 million births.
Congenital insensitivity to pain is found at an abnormally high frequency in northern Sweden, where nearly 40 cases have been reported.