FUNCTIONAL CONNECTIVITY IN PATIENTS WITH CHRONIC NEUROPATHIC PAIN

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This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. Primary support for the subproject and the subproject's principal investigator may have been provided by other sources, including other NIH sources. The Total Cost listed for the subproject likely represents the estimated amount of Center infrastructure utilized by the subproject, not direct funding provided by the NCRR grant to the subproject or subproject staff. Cognitive behavioral therapy has long been used as a strategy for modulating chronic pain. Functional connectivity is an imaging technique to examine the strength of timecourse covariance of two neural entities. To better understand connectivity in the supraspinal modulation of pain, we looked at functional connectivity of the "pain matrix" as chronic pain patients modulated pain intensity with cognitive behavioral therapy. Five patients with chronic NP in a limb were instructed and trained on the cognitive behavioral strategies of attention, distraction, and positive and negative reappraisal. Each subject completed 4 scans using each strategy to modulate their pain, and a resting state scan. After performing resting state fMRI using a 3T MRI, the connectivity for each subject was calculated as the pair-wise correlation between average ROI time-courses. Subsequently, the average connectivity was determined by averaging across subjects. Finally, connectivity in different scans was compared using the Fisher's Z transformation. To read about other projects ongoing at the Lucas Center, please visit http://rsl.stanford.edu/ (Lucas Annual Report and ISMRM 2011 Abstracts)