New Study: People with chronic back pain, more sensitive to annoying noises

According to the study published in Annals of Neurology on March 24, 2026, people who suffer chronic back pain experience harsher sounds than those who have no pain.

What does the study show?

Most people, about 8 in 10 in the United States, experience back pain in life, and chronic pain cases are on the rise.

The study has found that chronically pained people responded more strongly to unpleasant sounds than 84 percent of painless people and that the stronger the pain of the back, the higher the sense of harassment by sound.

According to the study report, the new psychological therapy, known as PRT (the therapy for pain reproducing, called ʹpain reprocessing therapy), brought about notable improvement in pain and slight improvement in noise tolerance.

There could be a kind of common volume in the brain that affects both the intensity of back pain and the discomfort of sounds”, Yoni K said. Ashar from University of Colorado.

How does this work in the brain?

The sounds are processed mainly in the hearing cortex in the brain's temple lobes.

Deeper areas, such as insulin, affect the way we experience emotions, including pain and sound.

The study examined the brain scans of 142 adults with chronic pain and 51 painless individuals, using functional magnetic resonance ( FMRI). Participants heard unpleasant sounds (such as a knife scratch on glass) and appreciated how annoying they were.

The results showed that people with pain not only experienced sounds as more annoying but also their brains responded more strongly to these incentives.

This confirmed what they told us, that sounds were really more unpleasant to them”, Ashar said.

A broader link: Multisensorial sensitivity

Other scholars point out that this may help to understand better why some people with chronic pain are more sensitive to light, touch, or pressure, symptoms usually associated with migraines or fibromyalgia.

These findings add another important part to the sense that chronic pain is linked to a general increase in sensitivity to many incentives”, Sean Mackey of Stanford University said.

However, it remains unclear whether chronic pain causes this sensitivity or people who are more sensitive at first are more likely to develop chronic pain

The Role of Treatment

Chronic pain participants submitted to the PRT, a therapy aimed at “reforcing the” brain to perceive pain as not dangerous.

This therapy uses education on pain, mental exercise and instructed meditation, as well as focus on body senses.

After the treatment, there was a significant reduction in pain and a slight improvement in tolerance of the softest sounds (but not to those too strong).

It's not uncommon for chronic pain patients to have the sensitivity to light, sound, and other feelings”, psychologist Matt Schumann of Mainic said.

However, he has stressed that the results are promising but still limited and require more studies.

What is expected in the future?

Researchers plan to examine other senses, such as sight, smell, and taste, to see if there is a broader phenomenon of “the achievement of multisensorial sensitivity” in chronic pain individuals.