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指标，慢性顽固性疼痛治疗的进展受到限制。许多类型的慢性疼痛会因运动而加剧。我们观察到，心理运动想象涉及许多与真实的运动相同的感觉-运动过程，利用这一观察，我们在两项初步研究中证明，慢性疼痛以特定和可重复的方式改变了涉及想象运动的任务的表现。根据目前对真实的和想象的运动之间关系的描述以及我们迄今为止的研究，我们认为模拟动作提供了一种可量化的、可再现的和对治疗干预反应灵敏的疼痛测量。由于建议的任务提供了性能度量（例如，反应时间和准确性），这些任务预期提供疼痛严重性的测量，其比疼痛严重性的多重确定的整体测量更直接地反映功能状态。最后，由于心理运动想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。

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.