Author: Zheng W1,2, Woo CW3,4, Yao Z1, Goldstein P5,6,7, Atlas LY8,9,10, Roy M11, Schmidt L12, Krishnan A13, Jepma M14, Hu B1, Wager TD5,6,15
Affiliation: <sup>1</sup>School of Information Science and Engineering, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, 730000, P. R. China.
<sup>2</sup>Key Laboratory for Biomedical Engineering of Ministry of Education, College of Biomedical Engineering and Instrument Science, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, P. R. China.
<sup>3</sup>Center for Neuroscience Imaging Research, Institute for Basic Science, Suwon 16419, Republic of Korea.
<sup>4</sup>Department of Biomedical Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon 16419, Republic of Korea.
<sup>5</sup>Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309, USA.
<sup>6</sup>Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309, USA.
<sup>7</sup>The School of Public Health, University of Haifa, Haifa, 3498838, Israel.
<sup>8</sup>National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA.
<sup>9</sup>National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA.
<sup>10</sup>National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health, Baltimore, MD 21224, USA.
<sup>11</sup>Department of Psychology, McGill University, Montréal, Quebec H3A 0G4, Canada.
<sup>12</sup>Control-Interoception-Attention (CIA) team, Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière (ICM), Sorbonne University / CNRS / INSERM, 75013 Paris, France.
<sup>13</sup>Department of Psychology, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, Brooklyn, NY 11210, USA.
<sup>14</sup>Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 1018 WS, The Netherlands.
<sup>15</sup>Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA.
Conference/Journal: Cereb Cortex.
Date published: 2019 Dec 9
Other:
Pages: bhz276 , Special Notes: doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhz276. [Epub ahead of print] , Word Count: 237
Recent studies indicate that a significant reorganization of cerebral networks may occur in patients with chronic pain, but how immediate pain experience influences the organization of large-scale functional networks is not yet well characterized. To investigate this question, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging in 106 participants experiencing both noxious and innocuous heat. Painful stimulation caused network-level reorganization of cerebral connectivity that differed substantially from organization during innocuous stimulation and standard resting-state networks. Noxious stimuli increased somatosensory network connectivity with (a) frontoparietal networks involved in context representation, (b) "ventral attention network" regions involved in motivated action selection, and (c) basal ganglia and brainstem regions. This resulted in reduced "small-worldness," modularity (fewer networks), and global network efficiency and in the emergence of an integrated "pain supersystem" (PS) whose activity predicted individual differences in pain sensitivity across 5 participant cohorts. Network hubs were reorganized ("hub disruption") so that more hubs were localized in PS, and there was a shift from "connector" hubs linking disparate networks to "provincial" hubs connecting regions within PS. Our findings suggest that pain reorganizes the network structure of large-scale brain systems. These changes may prioritize responses to painful events and provide nociceptive systems privileged access to central control of cognition and action during pain.
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KEYWORDS: functional network; hub disruption; immediate pain; inter-system connectivity; reorganization
PMID: 31813959 DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhz276