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Monitoring Acupuncture Effects on Human Brain by fMRI

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Published on: April 8, 2010

Exploring the brain in pain: activations, deactivations and their relation.

Jian Kong¹, Marco L Loggia, Carolyn Zyloney

¹Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, MA, USA MGH/MIT/HMS Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Charlestown, MA, USA MGH/MIT CRC Biomedical Imaging Core, Charlestown, MA, USA Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.

|December 17, 2009

Summary

Pain stimuli cause distinct brain activation and deactivation patterns, with deactivations being more pronounced for lower pain intensities. These fMRI signal changes suggest different neural networks underlie various aspects of pain perception.

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Published on: January 21, 2017

Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Pain Research
Neuroimaging

Background:

Neuroimaging studies on pain primarily examine Blood-Oxygen-Level-Dependent (BOLD) signal increases (activations).
Brain signal decreases (deactivations) during pain are less frequently studied but may offer crucial insights.
Understanding both activation and deactivation patterns is vital for a comprehensive view of pain processing.

Purpose of the Study:

To quantify brain activation and deactivation patterns in response to varying heat pain intensities (HIGH and LOW).
To investigate the relationship between fMRI signal increases and decreases during pain application.
To explore the functional connectivity of pain-modulated brain regions during resting states.

Main Methods:

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) was used to measure brain activity in 61 subjects under two heat pain conditions.
Functional connectivity analysis was performed on a subset of 12 subjects during resting states.
Correlational analyses examined the relationship between activation and deactivation patterns.

Main Results:

Pain stimuli induced intensity-dependent fMRI signal increases within the pain matrix (HIGH > LOW).
Noxious stimuli also led to deactivations in brain regions, including the default network (DMN).
Deactivations were more extensive for LOW pain compared to HIGH pain, indicating a dissociation between activated and deactivated networks.

Conclusions:

There is no linear relationship between brain activation and deactivation during pain perception.
Activated and deactivated brain networks likely represent distinct components of the overall pain experience.
These findings highlight the complexity of neural processing in response to noxious stimuli.