Aberrant temporal and spatial brain activity during rest in patients with chronic pain
Open Access
- 22 March 2010
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
- Vol. 107 (14), 6493-6497
- https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1001504107
Abstract
In the absence of external stimuli, human hemodynamic brain activity displays slow intrinsic variations. To find out whether such fluctuations would be altered by persistent pain, we asked 10 patients with unrelenting chronic pain of different etiologies and 10 sex- and age-matched control subjects to rest with eyes open during 3-T functional MRI. Independent component analysis was used to identify functionally coupled brain networks. Time courses of an independent component comprising the insular cortices of both hemispheres showed stronger spectral power at 0.12 to 0.25 Hz in patients than in control subjects, with the largest difference at 0.16 Hz. A similar but weaker effect was seen in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas activity of the precuneus and early visual cortex, used as a control site, did not differ between the groups. In the patient group, seed point-based correlation analysis revealed altered spatial connectivity between insulae and anterior cingulate cortex. The results imply both temporally and spatially aberrant activity of the affective pain-processing areas in patients suffering from chronic pain. The accentuated 0.12- to 0.25-Hz fluctuations in the patient group might be related to altered activity of the autonomic nervous system.Keywords
This publication has 47 references indexed in Scilit:
- Altered Resting State in Diabetic Neuropathic PainPLOS ONE, 2009
- Influence of heart rate on the BOLD signal: The cardiac response functionNeuroImage, 2009
- How do you feel — now? The anterior insula and human awarenessNature Reviews Neuroscience, 2009
- The effect of respiration variations on independent component analysis results of resting state functional connectivityHuman Brain Mapping, 2008
- Gabapentin evoked changes in functional activity in nociceptive regions in the brain of the anaesthetized rat: an fMRI studyBritish Journal of Pharmacology, 2008
- The respiration response function: The temporal dynamics of fMRI signal fluctuations related to changes in respirationNeuroImage, 2008
- Low-frequency fluctuations in the cardiac rate as a source of variance in the resting-state fMRI BOLD signalNeuroImage, 2007
- Brain activity for spontaneous pain of postherpetic neuralgia and its modulation by lidocaine patch therapyPain, 2007
- Placebo and Opioid Analgesia-- Imaging a Shared Neuronal NetworkScience, 2002
- Fast and robust fixed-point algorithms for independent component analysisIEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, 1999