Magnetoencephalography Characterization of Pain Anticipation in Patients with Post-Stroke Thalamic Pain
Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: Chronic neuropathic pain is a debilitating disorder of the central or peripheral nervous system and estimated to affect 100 million Americans.Pain is not just physiological, but a social issue because it leads to severe disability and affects quality of life.According to pain "neuromatrix" theory, pain has significant affective and cognitive components that enhances pain experience and hence disability.The current project aims to characterize this affect component using magnetoencephalography (MEG) in patients with post-stroke thalamic pain (PSTP).For this purpose, specific experimental paradigms to evoke pain anticipation were designed along with MEG data analysis methodology.In Experiment-1, normal healthy subjects were studied to establish a standard against which patient population could be studied.Pain was conditioned using visual countdown cues.In Experiment-2, conditioning cues from visual, tactile and auditory modalities were employed to study the effect of multi-modal conditioning on pain affect in normal healthy population.In Experiment-3, PSTP patients who had stroke induced lesion in the thalamic nuclei and consequently unrelenting chronic pain on the side of the body contralateral to the lesion, were studied.Pain affect was characterized at baseline and after deep brain stimulation (DBS) treatment.Departing from conventional approach, in this project DBS of the ventral capsule was employed to modulate the affective (or anticipatory) component of pain and thereby reduce pain related disability in PSTP vi patients.MEG correlates of pain anticipation at both sensor and source level from each experiment is consolidated and summarized.Findings support MEG's role as a functional biomarker to characterize neural oscillatory activity related to pain affect and anticipation.
Author: Raghavan Gopalakrishnan
Institution: Cleveland State University
Language: English
Subfield: Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2596690993