Resting Functional Connectivity of the Periaqueductal Gray Is Associated With Normal Inhibition and Pathological Facilitation in Conditioned Pain Modulation.

ABSTRACT: Conditioned pain modulation (CPM), a psychophysical paradigm that is commonly used to infer the integrity of endogenous pain-altering systems by observation of the effect of one noxious stimulus on another, has previously identified deficient endogenous analgesia in fibromyalgia (FM) and other chronic pain conditions. The mechanisms underlying this deficiency, be they insufficient inhibition and/or active facilitation, are largely unknown. The present cross-sectional study used a combination of behavioral CPM testing, voxel-based morphometry, and resting state functional connectivity to identify neural correlates of CPM in healthy controls (HC; n = 14) and FM patients (n = 15), and to probe for differences that could explain the pain-facilitative CPM that was observed in our patient sample

SUBMITTER: Harper DE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5972067 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature