Pain and Relief Signals Muted in Fibromyalgia - MedPage Today

Patients with fibromyalgia showed less activation in brain responses to pain-related "punishment and reward" anticipatory signaling on functional MRI than healthy controls, a small study showed.Compared with patients with fibromyalgia, controls had significant increases in signaling in the right ventral tegmental area (VTA) while anticipating pain (P<0.01) and a trend for greater signal activation while actually experiencing pain (P=0.059), according to Marco L. Loggia, PhD, of Harvard Medical School, and colleagues.Controls also had greater decreases in VTA signaling when anticipating relief from pain (P<0.05), suggesting that patients with fibromyalgia experienced blunting of these anticipatory pain and relief responses, the researchers reported online in Arthritis & Rheumatism.It's becoming widely recognized that fibromyalgia is characterized by heightened sensitivity to pain, most likely because of abnormal central processing of painful stimuli.However, little is known about how anticipation of pain and relief may contribute to the affective and cognitive aspects of the experience of pain."Expectancy and pain-relevant anxiety, in particular, have been shown to shape subsequent perceptual states. Relief from pain, on the other hand, is a positive hedonic experience intrinsically linked to pain," Loggia and colleagues explained.To explore whether these components of pain might be altered in chronic pain states such as fibromyalgia, the res...
Source: Psychology of Pain - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs