[Chronic pain: emotional and cognitive consequences].

Chronic pain which had become a major public health problem, is always accompanied with emotional and cognitive disorders. These comorbidities are circular and auto generated as in low back pain or in somatoform pain as fibromyalgia. Cerebral imagery of pain show the superposition of emotional and cognitive circuits especially in frontal regions from where come the descending control of pain. Therefore common areas regulate the three functions. Consequences on semiology and treatment of chronic pain are discussed.