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Harvard academic explains chilli painkiller hopesDate: 04/10/2007 11:54:09
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An active ingredient found in chillies could be used as a painkiller to supersede traditional local anaesthetics.
US researchers believe a chemical called capsaicin found in the fruit may be an improvement on current anaesthetic drugs as it numbs pain without affecting movement or touch.
This may lead to improvements in healthcare when local anaesthetics are most commonly used, such as when a woman goes into labour, or on a trip to the dentist as patients would still be able to walk and talk with very little discomfort.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4's the World Tonight, lead professor Clifford Woolf said: "For labour for example, instead of the patients being paralysed and feeling nothing, they would have adequate pain relief but then be able to get up immediately after delivery was complete.
"For our validation studies we used capsaicin, which is the pungent ingredient in chilli peppers, as a way of opening channels that are found only in pain fibres to allow particular local anaesthetics into those fibres.
"The reason why you feel pain is you act on the pain fibres and what we are doing is using the activation by capsaicin of the pain fibres as a way of delivering drugs to those pain fibres."
Mr Woolf added: "Going to the dentists would mean that your face is not totally numb. Your muscles would not be paralysed so you wouldn't drool."
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