Lateralization of chronic facial pain: fact or fiction

Previous studies have shown that pain is generally reported more on the left side of the body. It has been hypothesized that patient report of left pain dominance may be due to the right hemisphere being less efficient in processing cutaneous sensory input while being dominant for emotional experience as compared with the left hemisphere of the brain. Only in cases of trigeminal neuralgia has self-report of pain been lateralized to the right side. Due to previous research findings, we postulated that other facial pain diagnoses may demonstrate a right-sided dominance due to the lack of neural crossover in the facial region. The results of the study found no significant difference between self-report of right- and left-sided facial pain within four diagnostic categories. It was concluded that the results of right lateralized pain with trigeminal neuralgia should not be generalized to the facial pain population as a whole.