Pain-related cerebral potentials in patients with frontal or parietal lobe lesions

The present study investigated the processing of painful electrical stimuli in patients with unilateral frontal or parietal lobe damage and matched control subjects. Patients with frontal lesions showed increased pain thresholds when the stimuli were administered contralateral to the lesion. While the peak-to-peak amplitudes of the N150/P250 components of the somatosensory potentials increased linearly with stimulus intensity in the control subjects, the responses in the frontal group did not change significantly between stimulation at pain and tolerance threshold. There was no evidence for altered pain processing in patients with parietal lobe lesions. The findings of the present study support the hypothesis of an involvement of the frontal cortex in pain perception in humans.