Individual Differences in Pain Sensitivity Vary as a Function of Precuneus Reactivity

• DOI: 10.1007/s10548-013-0291-0
• Publication Date: 2013-05-01T07:06:00Z
• Authors: Philippe Goffaux; Lydia Girard-Trem...; Serge Marchand; Kathya Daigle; Kevin Whittingstall
• Keywords: Adult; Male; Nociception; 0301 basic medicine; Brain Mapping; Individuality; Brain; Electroencephalography; Pain Perception; Electric Stimulation; Functional Laterality; Young Adult; 03 medical and health sciences; 0302 clinical medicine; Sural Nerve; Evoked Potentials, Somatosensory; Parietal Lobe; Reflex; Humans; Female; Pain Measurement

Although humans differ widely in how sensitive they are to painful stimuli, the neural correlates underlying such variability remains poorly understood. A better understanding of this is important given that baseline pain sensitivity scores relate closely to the risk of developing refractory, chronic pain. To address this, we used a matched perception paradigm which allowed us to control for individual variations in subjective experience. By measuring subjective pain, nociceptive flexion reflexes, and, somatosensory evoked brain potentials (with source localization analysis), we were able to map the brain's sequential response to pain while also investigating its relationship to pain sensitivity (i.e. change in the stimulation strength necessary to experience pain) and spinal cord activity. We found that pain sensitivity in healthy adults was closely tied to pain-evoked responses in the contralateral precuneus. Importantly, the precuneus did not contribute to the actual representation of pain in the brain, suggesting that pain sensitivity and pain representation depend on separate neuronal sub-systems.