Abstract
Pain, especially chronic pain, can lead to cognitive deficits. Mismatch negativity (MMN) is a change-specific component of the auditory event-related brain potential (ERP) that is thought to provide a unique window into sensory memory processes. The present study was designed to determine how chronic and acute pain affects auditory sensory memory. In experiment 1, MMNs elicited by standard and deviant auditory stimuli at short and long inter-stimulus intervals (ISIs) were compared between trigeminal neuralgia (TN) patients and demographically matched healthy controls (HCs). The TN patients were found to have stronger attenuation of the MMN at longer ISIs than HCs. Correlation analysis revealed a significant positive correlation between the sensory subscale of McGill Pain Questionnaire and MMN amplitude reduction across ISI conditions. In experiment 2, MMNs recorded before, during, and after the cold pressor test were compared in healthy subjects. MMN amplitude was significantly reduced during pain exposure and recovered immediately thereafter. These results suggest that both chronic pain and acute pain can interfere with automatic change detection processes in the brain. This study provides the first evidence that chronic pain patients have a faster auditory memory trace decay than HCs.
Highlights
Pain is a subjective experience that involves interactions among sensory, affective, and cognitive factors[1,2]
The trigeminal neuralgia (TN) patient and healthy controls (HCs) groups were well matched for age (t = 0.83, P = 0.411), gender (χ2 = 0.23, P = 0.725), and education level (t = 0.52, P = 0.609)
The TN patients exhibited a higher level of pain-related anxiety than HCs, manifested as more anxiety thoughts (PASS cognitive subscale, 13.29 ± 5.27 vs. 5.39 ± 5.39, t = 4.39, P < 0.001) and increased avoidance behaviors (PASS avoidance subscale, 16.94 ± 6.29 vs. 6.28 ± 6.83, t = 4.81, P < 0.001) when experiencing suffering
Summary
Pain is a subjective experience that involves interactions among sensory, affective, and cognitive factors[1,2]. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study of attention-related cerebral responses, Martinsen et al found that, relative to healthy controls (HCs), chronic pain patients had reduced activation in brain regions implicated in cognitive processing[8]. In another fMRI study, Aizawa et al found that patients with irritable bowel syndrome had cognitive flexibility impairments that were associated with altered activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and hippocampus[9]. The effect of chronic pain on sensory memory, as reflected by the MNN response to ISI lengthening, has not been examined and the effect of experimentally induced pain on MMN has not been reexamined since Dick et al.’s 2006 study. We predicted that the MMN amplitude would be reduced by acute cold pain and would recover after the pain subsided
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