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

Author
Abstract
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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 (VBM), 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. VBM identified a cluster encompassing the periaqueductal gray (PAG) that contained significantly less gray matter volume in FM patients. Higher resting connectivity between this cluster and cortical pain processing regions was associated with more efficient inhibitory CPM in both groups, whereas PAG connectivity with the dorsal pons was associated with greater CPM inhibition only in HC. Greater PAG connectivity to the caudal pons/rostral medulla, which was pain-inhibitory in HC, was associated with pain facilitation in FM.

Year of Publication
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2018
Journal
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The journal of pain : official journal of the American Pain Society
Date Published
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2018
ISSN Number
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1526-5900
URL
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http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1526-5900(18)30024-5
DOI
:
10.1016/j.jpain.2018.01.001
Short Title
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J Pain
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