Whether the Primary Somatosensory Cortex Plays an Important Role in Pain Coding?

Abstract

Pain is an unpleasant multidimensional experience associated with real or potential tissue damage, as well as a complex experience encompassing sensory-discriminative, affective-motivational and cognitive-emotional components. However, because it remains unclear for the role of the primary somatosensory cortex for encoding of the pain, this review mainly discusses the role of the primary somatosensory cortex for encoding the location, intensity and nature of pain stimulus from the animal studies, non-invasive brain damage studies combined with clinical imaging technologies. Finally, based on the current researches, we gave some possible reasons for the inconsistent results and the limitations of these studies, as well as put forward some suggestions that may be useful for the future study.