A Brain Signature to Differentiate Acute and Chronic Pain in Rats

The transition from acute pain to chronic pain entails considerable changes of patients at multiple levels of the nervous system and in psychological states. An accurate differentiation between acute and chronic pain is essential in pain management as it may help optimize analgesic treatments accord...

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Main Authors:	Guo, Yifei, Wang, Yuzheng, Sun, Yabin, Wang, Jin-Yan
Format:	Online
Language:	English
Published:	Frontiers Media S.A. 2016
Online Access:	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4849226/

id	pubmed-4849226
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	pubmed-48492262016-05-19 A Brain Signature to Differentiate Acute and Chronic Pain in Rats Guo, Yifei Wang, Yuzheng Sun, Yabin Wang, Jin-Yan Neuroscience The transition from acute pain to chronic pain entails considerable changes of patients at multiple levels of the nervous system and in psychological states. An accurate differentiation between acute and chronic pain is essential in pain management as it may help optimize analgesic treatments according to the pain state of patients. Given that acute and chronic pain could modulate brain states in different ways and that brain states could greatly shape the neural processing of external inputs, we hypothesized that acute and chronic pain would show differential effects on cortical responses to non-nociceptive sensory information. Here by analyzing auditory-evoked potentials (AEPs) to pure tones in rats with acute or chronic pain, we found opposite influences of acute and chronic pain on cortical responses to auditory inputs. In particular, compared to no-pain controls, the N100 wave of rat AEPs was significantly enhanced in rats with acute pain but significantly reduced in rats with chronic pain, indicating that acute pain facilitated cortical processing of auditory information while chronic pain exerted an inhibitory effect. These findings could be justified by the fact that individuals suffering from acute or chronic pain would have different vigilance states, i.e., the vigilance level to external sensory stimuli would be increased with acute pain, but decreased with chronic pain. Therefore, this auditory response holds promise of being a brain signature to differentiate acute and chronic pain. Instead of investigating the pain system per se, the study of pain-induced influences on cortical processing of non-nocicpetive sensory information might represent a potential strategy to monitor the progress of pain chronification in clinical applications. Frontiers Media S.A. 2016-04-28 /pmc/articles/PMC4849226/ /pubmed/27199727 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fncom.2016.00041 Text en Copyright © 2016 Guo, Wang, Sun and Wang. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution and reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
repository_type	Open Access Journal
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	US National Center for Biotechnology Information
building	NCBI PubMed
collection	Online Access
language	English
format	Online
author	Guo, Yifei Wang, Yuzheng Sun, Yabin Wang, Jin-Yan
spellingShingle	Guo, Yifei Wang, Yuzheng Sun, Yabin Wang, Jin-Yan A Brain Signature to Differentiate Acute and Chronic Pain in Rats
author_facet	Guo, Yifei Wang, Yuzheng Sun, Yabin Wang, Jin-Yan
author_sort	Guo, Yifei
title	A Brain Signature to Differentiate Acute and Chronic Pain in Rats
title_short	A Brain Signature to Differentiate Acute and Chronic Pain in Rats
title_full	A Brain Signature to Differentiate Acute and Chronic Pain in Rats
title_fullStr	A Brain Signature to Differentiate Acute and Chronic Pain in Rats
title_full_unstemmed	A Brain Signature to Differentiate Acute and Chronic Pain in Rats
title_sort	brain signature to differentiate acute and chronic pain in rats
description	The transition from acute pain to chronic pain entails considerable changes of patients at multiple levels of the nervous system and in psychological states. An accurate differentiation between acute and chronic pain is essential in pain management as it may help optimize analgesic treatments according to the pain state of patients. Given that acute and chronic pain could modulate brain states in different ways and that brain states could greatly shape the neural processing of external inputs, we hypothesized that acute and chronic pain would show differential effects on cortical responses to non-nociceptive sensory information. Here by analyzing auditory-evoked potentials (AEPs) to pure tones in rats with acute or chronic pain, we found opposite influences of acute and chronic pain on cortical responses to auditory inputs. In particular, compared to no-pain controls, the N100 wave of rat AEPs was significantly enhanced in rats with acute pain but significantly reduced in rats with chronic pain, indicating that acute pain facilitated cortical processing of auditory information while chronic pain exerted an inhibitory effect. These findings could be justified by the fact that individuals suffering from acute or chronic pain would have different vigilance states, i.e., the vigilance level to external sensory stimuli would be increased with acute pain, but decreased with chronic pain. Therefore, this auditory response holds promise of being a brain signature to differentiate acute and chronic pain. Instead of investigating the pain system per se, the study of pain-induced influences on cortical processing of non-nocicpetive sensory information might represent a potential strategy to monitor the progress of pain chronification in clinical applications.
publisher	Frontiers Media S.A.
publishDate	2016
url	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4849226/
_version_	1613572663770349568

A Brain Signature to Differentiate Acute and Chronic Pain in Rats

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