Motor Imagery as a Measure of Pain Severity

描述(由申请人提供)：由于缺乏可靠的、可量化的疼痛严重程度衡量标准，慢性顽固性疼痛的治疗进展受到限制。许多类型的慢性疼痛会因运动而加剧。在观察到心理运动想象参与了许多与真实运动相同的感觉-运动过程的基础上，我们在两项初步研究中证明，慢性疼痛以一种特定的、可重复的方式改变了涉及想象运动的任务的绩效。根据目前对真实运动和想象运动之间关系的描述以及我们迄今的研究，我们认为模拟动作提供了一种可量化、可重复性的疼痛测量方法，并对治疗干预有反应。由于拟议的任务提供了反映潜在感觉-运动处理的完整性的性能测量(例如，反应时间和准确性)，这些任务预计将提供比多个确定的全球疼痛严重程度测量更直接地反映功能状态的疼痛严重程度测量。最后，由于心理运动表象任务需要最小的语言能力或抽象推理，我们建议调查这些措施在认知障碍受试者中的使用情况。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Progress in the treatment of chronic, intractable pain has been limited by the lack of reliable, quantifiable measures of pain severity. Many types of chronic pain are exacerbated by movement. Capitalizing on the observation that mental motor imagery engages many of the same sensori-motor processes engaged by real movement, we have demonstrated in two preliminary investigations that performance on tasks that involve imagined movements is altered in a specific and reproducible fashion by chronic pain. Based on current accounts of the relationship between real and imagined movements as well as our studies to date, we argue that simulated action provides a measure of pain that is quantifiable, reproducible and responsive to therapeutic interventions. As the proposed tasks provide measures of performance (e.g., reaction times and accuracy) that reflect the integrity of the underlying sensori-motor processing, these tasks are expected to provide measures of pain severity that more directly reflect functional status than multiply-determined global measures of pain severity. Finally, as mental motor imagery tasks require minimal language capacity or abstract reasoning, we propose to investigate the use of these measures in subjects with cognitive impairment.