Sensory testing and topical capsaicin can characterize patients with rheumatoid arthritis

Anders, Bjoern; Anders, Malte; Kreuzer, Matthias; Zinn, Sebastian; Fricker, Lukas; Maier, Christoph; Wolters, Miriam; Köhm, Michaela; Behrens, Frank; Walter, Carmen

doi:10.1007/s10067-022-06185-0

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 41 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In order to avoid peripheral sensitization or stimulus wind up due to repetitive stimulation, both mechanical and contact heat stimulation were applied 12 times with a randomized or pseudo-randomized inter-stimulus interval. The number of trials in the literature ranges from 7 trials (Granovsky et al 2016;Anders et al 2022) up to 20 trials (Rosner et al 2018). We stimulated an area of 9 cm × 8 cm on the dorsal area of the dominant foot and applied the stimuli in a randomized pattern across the whole stimulation area.…”

Section: Standardized Noxious Stimulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

EEG-based sensory testing reveals altered nociceptive processing in elite endurance athletes

et al. 2022

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Increased exercise loads, as observed in elite athletes, seem to modulate the subjective pain perception in healthy subjects. The combination of electroencephalography (EEG) and standardized noxious stimulation can contribute to an objective assessment of the somatosensory stimulus processing. We assessed the subjective pain ratings and the electroencephalogram (EEG)-based response after standardized noxious mechanical and thermal stimuli as well as during conditioned pain modulation (CPM) in 26 elite endurance athletes and compared them to 26 recreationally active controls. Elite endurance athletes had consistently stronger somatosensory responses in the EEG to both mechanical and thermal noxious stimuli than the control group. We observed no significant group differences in the subjective pain ratings, which may have been influenced by our statistics and choice of stimuli. The CPM testing revealed that our conditioning stimulus modulated the subjective pain perception only in the control group, whereas the EEG indicated a modulatory effect of the conditioning stimulus on the spectral response only in the athletes group. We conclude that a higher activation in the cortical regions that process nociceptive information may either be an indicator for central sensitization or an altered stimulus salience in the elite endurance athletes’ group. Our findings from our CPM testing were limited by our methodology. Further longitudinal studies are needed to examine if exercise-induced changes in the somatosensory system might have a critical impact on the long-term health of athletes.

show abstract

Section: Standardized Noxious Stimulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

EEG-based sensory testing reveals altered nociceptive processing in elite endurance athletes

et al. 2022

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…A noxious thermal stimulus task was chosen because prior work has shown that sensitivity to and descending modulation of noxious thermal stimuli discriminates patients rheumatoid arthritis from controls [1; 15; 64].…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of Savoring Meditation on Positive Emotions and Pain-Related Brain Function: A Mechanistic Randomized Controlled Trial in People With Rheumatoid Arthritis

Finan,

Hunt,

Keaser

et al. 2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Positive emotions are a promising target for intervention in chronic pain, but mixed findings across trials to date suggest that existing interventions may not be optimized to efficiently engage the target. The aim of the current mechanistic randomized controlled trial was to test the effects of a single skill positive emotion-enhancing intervention called Savoring Meditation on pain-related neural and behavioral targets in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Participants included 44 patients with a physician-confirmed diagnosis of RA (n=29 included in fMRI analyses), who were randomized to either Savoring Meditation or a Slow Breathing control. Both meditation interventions were brief (four 20-minute sessions). Self-report measures were collected pre- and post-intervention. An fMRI task was conducted at post-intervention, during which participants practiced the meditation technique on which they had been trained while exposed to non-painful and painful thermal stimuli. Relative to Slow Breathing, Savoring significantly reduced experimental pain intensity ratings relative to rest (p<.001), increased cerebral blood flow in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and increased connectivity between the vmPFC and caudate during noxious thermal stimulation (z=2.3 voxelwise, FDR cluster corrected p=0.05). Participants in the Savoring condition also reported significantly increased positive emotions (ps<.05) and reduced anhedonic symptoms (p<.01) from pre-to post-intervention. These findings suggest that that Savoring recruits reward-enhancing corticostriatal circuits in the face of pain, and future work should extend these findings to evaluate if these mechanisms of Savoring are associated with improved clinical pain outcomes in diverse patient populations.

show abstract

“…The brain activity information extracted from electroencephalography (EEG) can be used as a biomarker of pain signals, that is, relatively independent of subjective influence. For instance, EEG-based contact heat-evoked potentials can provide objective responses during QST that are not dependent on the subjective characteristics of the tester or examinee ( Granovsky et al, 2016 ; Anders et al, 2022 ). Thus, the first goal of this study was to combine the QST, in the form of electrical stimuli provided by a commercial PainVision system, with simultaneous EEG recording.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

PainVision-based evaluation of brain potentials: a novel approach for quantitative pain assessment

Chen

Zhang

Han

et al. 2023

Front. Bioeng. Biotechnol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Introduction: The complex and multidimensional nature of pain poses a major challenge in clinical pain assessments. In this study, we aimed to evaluate a novel approach combining quantitative sensory testing (QST) with event-related potential measurements for assessment of experimental pain in healthy individuals.Methods: QST was performed with a commercial device (PainVision, PS-2100), and numeric rating scale (NRS) scores after exposure to different sensory stimuli were reported by the participants. Resting-state electroencephalography (EEG) was simultaneously performed to capture the cortical responses to peripheral stimulation.Results: Pain scores increased with the intensity of stimuli, with mean NRS scores of 2.7 ± 1.0 after mild stimuli and 5.6 ± 1.0 after moderate stimuli. A reproducible, significant P2-N2 complex was evoked by both mild and moderately painful stimuli, but not by non-painful stimuli. The latency of pain-related potentials was not significantly different between stimuli. The amplitudes of both P2 and N2 components significantly increased when intense nociception was applied, and the increments mainly originated from theta oscillations.Conclusion: The combination of QST with EEG was feasible for subjective and objective pain assessment. Distinct patterns of brain potentials were associated with the phenotype of the peripheral stimuli (e.g., noxious versus. innoxious, high versus. low pain intensity).

show abstract

Sensory testing and topical capsaicin can characterize patients with rheumatoid arthritis

Cited by 6 publications

References 41 publications

EEG-based sensory testing reveals altered nociceptive processing in elite endurance athletes

EEG-based sensory testing reveals altered nociceptive processing in elite endurance athletes

Effects of Savoring Meditation on Positive Emotions and Pain-Related Brain Function: A Mechanistic Randomized Controlled Trial in People With Rheumatoid Arthritis

PainVision-based evaluation of brain potentials: a novel approach for quantitative pain assessment

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About