Auditory change‐related cortical response is associated with hypervigilance to pain in healthy volunteers

Abstract

Background: Patients with chronic pain exhibit hypervigilance (heightened responsiveness to stimuli) to innocuous auditory stimuli as well as noxious stimuli."Generalized hypervigilance" suggests that individuals who show heightened responsiveness to one sensory system also show hypervigilance to other modalities. However, research exploring the existence of generalized hypervigilance in healthy subjects is limited.Methods: We investigated whether hypervigilance to pain is associated with auditory stimuli in healthy subjects using the pain vigilance and awareness questionnaire (PVAQ) and auditory change-related cortical responses (ACRs). ACRs are thought to reflect a change detection system, based on preceding sensory memory. We recorded ACRs under conditions that varied in terms of the accumulation of sensory memory as follows: short-ACR, with short preceding continuous stimuli and long-ACR, with long preceding continuous stimuli. In addition, the attention to pain (PVAQ-AP) and attention to changes in pain (PVAQ-ACP) subscales were evaluated.Results: Amplitudes of long-ACR showed significant positive correlations with PVAQ-ACP, whereas those of short-ACR did not show any significant correlations. Conclusions: Generalized hypervigilance may be observed even in healthy subjects. ACR may be a useful index to evaluate the hypervigilance state in the human brain.

Neural indices of multimodal sensory and autonomic hyperexcitability in fibromyalgia

“…Carrillo-de-la-Pena and colleagues ( Carrillo-de-la-Pena et al, 2006 ) examined auditory ERPs to a range of tone intensities and reported greater N1-P2 amplitudes and shorter latencies to very loud tones (105 dB) in FM participants compared to the CNT group, but did not replicate this finding in a follow-up study ( Samartin-Veiga et al, 2020 ). Converging support for cross-sensory hypervigilance has been provided by a recent study in healthy participants ( Otsuru et al, 2022 ), which reported a significant association between auditory change-related ERPs and attention and sensitivity to pain. This aligns with deficient habituation of the auditory N100 in FM participants reported in one study ( Choi et al, 2016 ), but another one failed to show this effect ( Montoya et al, 2006 ).…”

“…In contrast, the supporting evidence for generalized hypervigilance in other modalities has been mixed. While some researchers report augmented early ERPs ( Carrillo-de-la-Pena et al, 2006 , Otsuru et al, 2022 ) and deficient habituation of the N100 to auditory stimuli ( Choi et al, 2016 ), others have failed to find greater FM sensitivity to tones ( Lorenz, 1998 , Samartin-Veiga et al, 2020 ).…”