Cerebral oscillations of pain

摘要 慢性疼痛障碍是所有疾病中最沉重的负担之一，因为它们对 个人和社会的代价。慢性疼痛的新治疗方法的发展有 依赖于在啮齿动物疼痛模型中涉及遗传和分子方法的基础研究，但现有的药物 一般情况下，仅为少数患者提供非常有限的缓解。其结果是，大量的 患有慢性疼痛的人得不到治疗，而且只有部分缓解。有大量的和越来越多的证据 来自疼痛研究领域内外的研究表明，神经振荡反映了认知、情感、 和感觉过程，它们都是疼痛体验的组成部分。此外，我们可以针对这些 改变知觉的振荡模式。特别是，阿尔法波段活动与慢性疼痛有关， 我们最近广泛的工作和初步发现表明，阿尔法可以可靠地预测未来的敏感性 在健康受试者中，未来几分钟到几周内都会经历疼痛。在建议的研究中，我们使用 同步EEG-fMRI以继续我们正在进行的关于阿尔法振荡作为疼痛机制的工作并将其扩展 为了测试信号的特异性和敏感性，以及阿尔法、脑网络和 疼痛。拟议的工作将导致对疼痛的神经生物学的更好理解，识别新的 新的或改进的干预措施的大脑靶点，并可能揭示一个预后生物标记物 对测试新的治疗方法和客观评估个人的临床改善很有用 基础。

Summary Chronic pain disorders are amongst the most burdensome of all diseases in terms of their impact on the individual and the costs to society. The development of novel therapeutic approaches for chronic pain have relied on basic studies involving genetic and molecular approaches in rodent models of pain, but existing drugs generally provide very limited relief for only a small number of patients. The result is that a vast number of people with chronic pain go untreated and have only partial relief. There is substantial and growing evidence from within and outside the pain research fields that indicates neural oscillations reflect cognitive, emotional, and sensory processes, which are all components of the pain experience. Furthermore, we can target these oscillatory patterns to alter perception. In particular, alpha band activity has been associated with chronic pain, and our extensive recent work and preliminary findings indicate that alpha can reliably predict future sensitivity to pain experienced minutes to weeks in the future in healthy subjects. In the proposed studies, we use simultaneous EEG-fMRI to continue our ongoing work on alpha oscillations as pain mechanisms and extend it to test the specificity and sensitivity of the signals and the relationship between alpha, brain networks, and pain. The proposed work would lead to improved understanding of the neurobiology of pain, identify novel brain targets for new or improved interventions, and potentially reveal a prognostic biomarker that would be useful for testing new therapeutic approaches and objectively assessing clinical improvement on an individual basis.