Intrinsic Brain Connectivity in Fibromyalgia is Associated with Chronic Pain Intensity
By Vitaly Napadow, Lauren LaCount, Kyungmo Park, Suzie As-Sanie, Daniel J. Clauw, Richard E. Harris. Arthritis & Rheumatism, 2010
653 citations recorded by the source corpus.
OBJECTIVE Fibromyalgia (FM) is considered to be the prototypical central chronic pain syndrome and is associated with widespread pain that fluctuates spontaneously. Multiple studies have demonstrated altered brain activity in these patients. Our objective was to investigate the degree of connectivity between multiple brain networks in FM, as well as how activity in these networks correlates with spontaneous pain. METHODS Resting functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data in FM patients (n=18) and age-matched healthy controls (HC, n=18) were analyzed using dual regression independent component analysis (ICA) - a data driven approach used to identify independent brain networks. We evaluated intrinsic, or resting, connectivity in multiple brain networks: the default mode network (DMN), the executive attention network (EAN), and the medial visual network (MVN), with the MVN serving as a negative control. Spontaneous pain levels were also covaried with intrinsic connectivity. RESULTS We found that FM patients had greater connectivity within the DMN and right EAN (rEAN; p<0.05, corrected), and greater connectivity between the DMN and the insular cortex – a brain region known to process evoked pain. Furthermore, greater spontaneous pain at the time of the scan correlated with greater intrinsic connectivity between the insula and both the DMN and rEAN (p<0.05, corrected). CONCLUSION Our findings indicate that resting brain activity within multiple networks is associated with spontaneous clinical pain in FM. These findings may also have broader implications for how subjective experiences such as pain arise from a complex interplay amongst multiple brain networks.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Physiology, Psychiatry and Mental health
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/db0279b2bd821646f6e756b0f393e7c97e310a6b
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Citations in the corpus
- Neuroimaging of the Periaqueductal Gray: State of the Field (2011, background): “, 2007) and spontaneous pain in fibromyalgia (Napadow et al., 2010) and migraine (Cao et al.”
- Pain and the brain: Specificity and plasticity of the brain in clinical chronic pain (2010, background): “These results suggest that the brain in the resting state (brain activity in the absence of subjects doing anything specific) should also be distorted in chronic pain conditions, and this in fact has now been asserted for a number of clinical conditions [21,22,66,75].”