Congenital Insensitivity to Pain

 

Congenital insensitivity to pain is a rare condition where a person cannot feel pain and has never felt physical pain.  Cognition and sensation is otherwise normal; for instance they can still feel discriminative touch (though not always temperature) and there is no detectable physical abnormality.  Children with congenital insensitivity to pain cannot respond to simple feelings of warning and are therefore at a higher risk of more severe diseases.  As with Familial Dysautonomia there are many problems within the oral cavity of children and they are susceptible to fractures to bones. 

In congenital insensitivity to pain, researchers have found that this disorder occurs from mutations of a gene on chromosome 2.  This gene helps encode a portion of the voltage-gated sodium ion channel.  Therefore, if the individual receives the two recessive mutated genes, the mutated gene will cause the voltage-gated sodium ion channels to dysfunction, so that they won’t open.  This causes the cells to neglect to allow sodium ions through the membranes, so that the neurons won’t be activated to send the pain signals. So, the neurons of an individual with congenital insensitivity to pain will never complete their pathway from the painful source to the brain.