Abstract
The existence of nociceptive-specific brain regions has been a controversial issue for decades. Multisensory fMRI studies, which examine fMRI activities in response to various types of sensory stimulation, could help identify nociceptive-specific brain regions, but previous studies are limited by sample size and they did not differentiate nociceptive-specific regions and nociceptive-preferential regions, which have significantly larger responses to nociceptive input. In this study, we conducted a multisensory fMRI experiment on 80 healthy participants, with the aim to determine whether there are certain brain regions that specifically or preferentially respond to nociceptive stimulation. By comparing the evoked fMRI responses across four sensory modalities, we found a series of brain regions specifically or preferentially involved in nociceptive sensory input. Particularly, we found different parts of some cortical regions, such as insula and cingulate gyrus, play different functional roles in the processing of nociceptive stimulation. Hence, this multisensory study improves our understanding of the functional integrations and segregations of the nociceptive-related regions.
Highlights
Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage or described in terms of such damage (IASP, International Association for the Study of Pain) (Loeser and Treede, 2008)
By using General Linear Model (GLM) and conjunction analysis, we identified a series of modality-specific regions, which were in response to one certain type of sensory modality only
By using PSC features and analysis of variance (ANOVA), we identified a series of modality-preferential regions, which preferentially responded to a certain sensory modality, instead of following the conventional concept of sensoryspecific regions
Summary
Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage or described in terms of such damage (IASP, International Association for the Study of Pain) (Loeser and Treede, 2008). Some multisensory studies, which used a random sequence of different types of sensory stimulation to examine activated cortical regions, found that non-nociceptive somatosensory, auditory, and visual stimulation can activate cortical regions largely similar to those regions activated nociceptive somatosensory stimulation (Downar et al, 2000; Mouraux and Iannetti, 2009; Mouraux et al, 2011) Based on this phenomenon, many researchers put forward another possible point of view: the so-called “pain matrix” may be related to the significant input of sensory stimulation and the ability to respond to it, regardless of the type of sensory stimulation input (Iannetti and Mouraux, 2010; Legrain et al, 2011; Mouraux et al, 2011; Iannetti et al, 2013). The pain matrix is not specific to pain
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