Gamma oscillations are involved in the sensorimotor transformation of pain

Abstract

Schulz E, Tiemann L, Witkovsky V, Schmidt P, Ploner M. Gamma oscillations are involved in the sensorimotor transformation of pain. J Neurophysiol 108: 1025-1031, 2012. First published May 23, 2012 doi:10.1152/jn.00186.2012.-Pain signals threat and initiates motor responses to avoid harm. The transformation of pain into a motor response is thus an essential part of pain. Here, we investigated the neural mechanisms subserving the sensorimotor transformation of pain at the cortical level by using electroencephalography. In a simple reaction time experiment, brief painful stimuli were delivered to the left hand of healthy human subjects who responded with button presses of the right hand. The results show that the simple reaction time task was associated with neuronal responses at delta/theta, alpha/beta, and gamma frequencies. The analysis of the relationship between neuronal activity and response speed revealed that gamma oscillations, which were temporally coupled to the painful stimuli, but not temporally coupled to the motor response, predicted reaction times. Lateralization of gamma oscillations indicates that they originate from motor areas rather than from sensory areas. We conclude that gamma oscillations are involved in the sensorimotor transformation of pain whose efficiency they reflect. We hypothesize that the relationship between stimulus-locked gamma oscillations and reaction times reflects a direct thalamo-motor route of nociceptive information that is central to the biological function of pain.

The Development of Nociceptive Network Activity in the Somatosensory Cortex of Freely Moving Rat Pups

“…An increase in theta energy has been reported in awake adult rat somatosensory cortex following both capsaicin application to the skin and chronic nerve injury (LeBlanc et al 2014, 2016b) and also after noxious thermal skin stimulation in anaesthetized adult rats (Devonshire et al 2015). Theta and gamma energy, if comparable to human EEG data, could reflect the maturation of sensorimotor transformation of pain (Schulz et al 2012) or increased attentional processing and enhanced saliency of pain-related signals (Hauck et al 2007) as well as subjective pain intensity (Zhang et al 2012; Dufort Rouleau et al 2015). …”

Brain Oscillations Elicited by the Cold Pressor Test: A Putative Index of Untreated Essential Hypertension

“…Previous studies have shown that GBA is enhanced during attentional selection of sensory information [49]. Additionally GBA modulations over the somatosensory cortex are enhanced by attention and vary with pain processing [10, 38, 49].…”

Pain anticipatory phenomena in patients with central poststroke pain: a magnetoencephalography study

“…In addition, different frequency bands have been reported to have specific functional roles. Specifically, betaand gamma-band activity has been reported to have a functional role in behavioral, affective, and cognitive processing in normal (Engel and Fries 2010;Jensen et al 2007;Tiemann et al 2010) and pathological states (Engel and Fries 2010;Herrmann and Demiralp 2005;Herrmann et al 2010), including pain and pain anticipation in a healthy population (Schulz et al 2012;Senkowski et al 2014). The three-cue paradigm used in this study was intended to progressively evoke anticipation.…”