Evidence for a spinal involvement in temporal pain contrast enhancement

Abstract

Spatiotemporal filtering and amplification of sensory information at multiple levels during the generation of perceptual representations is a fundamental processing principle of the nervous system. While for the visual and auditory system temporal filtering of sensory signals has been noticed for a long time, respective contrast mechanisms within the nociceptive system became only recently subject of investigations, mainly in the context of offset analgesia (OA) subsequent to noxious stimulus decreases. In the present study we corroborate in a first experiment the assumption that offset analgesia involves a central component by showing that an OA-like effect accounting for 74% of a corresponding OA reference can be evoked by decomposing the stimulus offset into two separate box-car stimuli applied within the same dermatome but to separate populations of primary afferent neurons. In order to draw conclusions about the levels of the CNS at which temporal filtering of nociceptive information takes place during OA we investigate in a second experiment neuronal activity in the spinal cord during a painful thermal stimulus offset employing high-resolution fMRI in healthy volunteers. Pain-related BOLD responses in the spinal cord were significantly reduced during OA and their time course followed widely behavioral hypoalgesia, but not the thermal stimulation profile. In summary, the results suggest that temporal pain contrast enhancement during OA comprises a central mechanism and this mechanism becomes already effective at the level of the spinal cord.