New Scientist
Image: Carlospics
It’s the sweetest relief… until it’s not. Scratching an itch only gives temporary respite before making it worse – we now know why.
Millions of people experience chronic itching at some point, as a result of conditions ranging from eczema to kidney failure to cancer. The condition can have a serious impact on quality of life. On the face of it, the body appears to have a coping mechanism: scratching an itch until it hurts can bring instant relief. But when the pain wears off the itch is often more unbearable than before – which means we scratch even harder, sometimes to the point of causing painful skin damage.
“People keep scratching even though they might end up bleeding,” says Zhou-Feng Chen at the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri, who has now worked out why this happens. His team’s work in mice suggests it comes down to an unfortunate bit of neural crosstalk. Read more on newscientist.com…
