Chronic pain has been increasingly recognized not only as a sensory disorder but also as a condition that profoundly disrupts affective and motivational processes. Preclinical research indicates that persistent nociceptive input drives maladaptive ch...
Computational modeling of the neural activity in the human spinal cord may help elucidate the underlying mechanisms involved in the complex processing of painful stimuli. In this study, we use a biologically-plausible model of the dorsal horn circuit...
This study explores the multifaceted effects of acute physical fatigue on information processing, pain threshold, and muscular performance. Enrolling 28 recreational athletes, we used a high-intensity interval training (HIIT) protocol to induce fatig...
Objectives: To investigate whether a Multimodal Rehabilitation Program (MRP) affects the change in visual–spatial abilities, especially attention, information-processing speed, visual–spatial learning, the severity of depression, and stra...
The most symmetric molecule, Buckminster fullerene C60, due to its unique properties, has been intensively studied for various medical and technological advances. Minimally invasive and minimally toxic treatments hold great promise for future applica...
A natural language processing (NLP) pipeline was developed to identify lumbar spine imaging findings associated with low back pain (LBP) in X-radiation (X-ray), computed tomography (CT), and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) reports. A total of 18,640...
25 April 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed our lifestyles, habits, and daily routine. Some of the impacts of COVID-19 have been widely reported already. However, many effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are still to be discovered. The main objective of this stud...
Pain is defined as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage”. This complex perception arises from the coordinated activity of several brain area...
Inflammation or injury to the somatosensory nervous system may result in chronic pain conditions, which affect millions of people and often cause major health problems. Emerging lines of evidence indicate that reactive oxygen species (ROS), such as s...
Tissue injury and inflammation may result in chronic pain, a severe debilitating disease that is associated with great impairment of quality of life. An increasing body of evidence indicates that members of the Rab family of small GTPases contribute...
9 February 2023
Knowledge about the mechanisms of transmission and the processing of nociceptive information, both in healthy and pathological states, has greatly expanded in recent years. This rapid progress is due to a multidisciplinary approach involving the simu...
Aging is known to affect nociceptive processing, e.g., the ability to inhibit pain. This study aims to investigate whether pain responses in older individuals are associated with prefrontal characteristics, namely (i) executive functioning performanc...
Orphan G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCR) comprise a large number of receptors which are widely distributed in the nervous system and represent an opportunity to identify new molecular targets in pain medicine. GPR55 and GPR119 are two orphan GPCR re...
Background: In clinical practice, the implementation of tailored treatment is crucial for assessing the patient’s emotional processing profile. Here, we investigate all three levels of analysis characterizing emotion processing, i.e., recogniti...
Although current evidence supports the use of dry needling for improving some clinical outcomes in people with neck pain, no previous research explored the effects of dry needling on the central processing of pain and autonomic nervous system in this...
26 April 2022
Quality improvement plays a major role in healthcare, and numerous approaches have been developed to implement changes. However, the reasons for success or failure of the methods applied often remains obscure. Normalization process theory, recently d...
Background/Objectives: Tendinopathy is a condition associated with pain and limited function. While upper and lower extremity tendinopathies may have different functional implications, there have been a number of reports supporting different patterns...
Current evidence suggests that botulinum neurotoxins (BoNTs) A1 and B1, given locally into peripheral tissues such as skin, muscles, and joints, alter nociceptive processing otherwise initiated by inflammation or nerve injury in animal models and hum...
Background and Objectives: Defined by chronic pain, rheumatic diseases are often co-occurring with anxiety and depression. Among the available psychological interventions, cognitive-behavioral therapies have an already-proven efficiency in these case...
Striatal dopamine dysfunction is associated with the altered top-down modulation of pain processing. The dopamine D2-like receptor family is a potential substrate for such effects due to its primary expression in the striatum, but evidence for this i...
It is well established that individuals with cognitive impairment present with disturbed forms of pain processing of still unknown origin. As a neurocognitive factor, executive functions have become favored candidates for explanation. For further ins...
The sodium-activated potassium channel Slack (KNa1.1, Slo2.2, or Kcnt1) is highly expressed in populations of sensory neurons, where it mediates the sodium-activated potassium current (IKNa) and modulates neuronal activity. Previous studies suggest t...
Extracellular vesicles (EVs), including exosomes and microvesicles, are membrane-bound particles released by cells into extracellular space. These vesicles carry various molecules, such as proteins and lipids, and can serve as mediators of intercellu...
Background/Objectives: Needle procedures cause acute pain through mechanical, chemical, sensory, and affective processes. We synthesized human and animal evidence and developed a framework spanning peripheral nociception, spinal/trigeminal modulation...
Background: Fibromyalgia is a chronic pain condition characterised by altered pain processing, widespread pain, and symptoms including sleep disturbance, fatigue, and psychological distress. Emerging evidence suggests that modifiable multimodal lifes...
Pain is a multidimensional experience arising from the integration of nociceptive signals with affective, cognitive and behavioral processes. In Alzheimer’s disease (AD), pain assessment remains challenging, as reduced self-reported pain is fre...
The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is particularly critical for pain information processing. Peripheral nerve injury triggers neuronal hyper-excitability in the ACC and mediates descending facilitation to the spinal dorsal horn. The mechanically gat...
Pain is a complex phenomenon that arises from the interaction of multiple neuroanatomic and neurochemical systems with several cognitive and affective processes. Nowadays, the assessment of pain intensity still relies on the use of self-reports. Howe...
Background: Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) of the motor cortex (M1) produces short-term inhibition of pain. Unihemispheric concurrent dual-site tDCS (UHCDS-tDCS) over the M1 and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) has greater effec...
Previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies in healthy controls (HC) and pain-free migraine patients found activations to pain-related words in brain regions known to be activated while subjects experience pain. The aim of the prese...
Infant cries serve as a primary indicator of distress and pain; however, distinguishing pain-related cries from those triggered by other needs remains a challenging task, even for trained professionals. Timely and accurate pain assessment is essentia...
The dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) has gained attention owing to its involvement in various physiological functions, such as sleep–awake, feeding, and emotion, with its analgesic role being particularly significant. It is described as the “pa...
A great deal of evidence supports the inevitable importance of spinal glycinergic inhibition in the development of chronic pain conditions. However, it remains unclear how glycinergic neurons contribute to the formation of spinal neural circuits unde...
Introduction: Migraine is featured by altered nociceptive processing and the presence of cognitive impairments. No study has previously investigated the influence of neurocognitive performance and executive functions in descending pain processing in...
Piglets often undergo several painful treatments during the initial days of their lives. In this review, we investigate the acute (i.e., immediate), short-, and long-term implications of piglet processing on behavioral, physiological, clinical, and p...
Though there is growing awareness of the overrepresentation of autistic patients in chronic pain clinics, potential adaptations for the assessment and treatment of chronic pain in this population have not yet been established. To address this gap, a...
A high number of online support groups have been created on social media platforms to reinforce personal empowerment and social support. The goal of this study was to perform natural language processing by constructing a bag-of-words model and conduc...
Background/Objectives: Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (hEDS) is the most common form of EDS, characterized by joint hypermobility, skin findings, and joint pains or recurrent dislocations that may also be associated with other several extra-artic...
Self-similarities at different time scales embedded within a self-organizing neural manifold are well recognized. In this study, we hypothesize that the Hurst fractal dimension (HFD) of the scalp electroencephalographic (EEG) signal reveals statistic...
30 January 2023
Pain is modulated by multiple factors. A relevant psychological process peculiar to athletes and which could be associated with pain is Psychological Readiness to Return to Sport (PRRS). The analysis of this association in competition context is part...
Breathing-controlled electrical stimulation (BreEStim) is an innovative neuromodulation intervention that synchronizes deep voluntary breathing with peripheral electrical stimulation. Prior studies have shown its analgesic effects in healthy adults a...
Standard feature engineering involves manually designing measurable descriptors based on some expert knowledge in the domain of application, followed by the selection of the best performing set of designed features for the subsequent optimisation of...
Predicting pain in physical rehabilitation is challenging due to subjectivity, patient variability, and self-report bias, especially in telerehabilitation. This study aims to determine whether machine-learning models based on heart rate (HR), heart r...
Background/Objectives: The dual burden of cancer and pain during chemotherapy can negatively impact individuals’ personal integrity, or the “self”. Yet, coping strategies addressing these dual challenges are rarely employed in cance...
Imaging studies help us understand the important role of brainstem and midbrain regions in human trigeminal pain processing without solving the question of how these regions actually interact. In the current study, we describe this connectivity and i...
Changes in behaviour are often caused by painful conditions. Therefore, the assessment of behaviour is important for the recognition of pain, but also for the assessment of quality of life. Automated detection of movement and the behaviour of a horse...
Background/Objectives: Highly sensitive persons (HSPs) are characterized by increased emotional and sensory responsiveness, which may predispose them to anxiety, emotional dysregulation, and sensory overload. Music therapy based on gong sound session...
Background/Objectives: Pain is a common and disabling non-motor manifestation of neurodegenerative disorders, but the contribution of glial cells to nociceptive processing remains incompletely understood. This systematic review evaluated evidence fro...
The term overriding spinous processes (ORSPs), commonly known as “kissing spine syndrome,” refers to a skeletal abnormality in horses that is characterized by the narrowing (<4 mm) of the interspinous space and touching or overlapping...
Cervical sagittal balance plays a pivotal role in spine surgeries as it has a significant impact on the clinical outcomes in cervical spine surgery. Image processing techniques have significantly improved the accuracy and precision of cervical surgic...
of 52