Pain and functional imaging

• Published in: Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B. Biological sciences Vol. 354; no. 1387; pp. 1347 - 1358
• Main Author: Ingvar, Martin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England The Royal Society 29-07-1999
• Subjects: Anatomy; Blood flow; Brain; Brain - blood supply; Brain - diagnostic imaging; Brain - physiopathology; Cerebral Cortex; Cerebrovascular Circulation; Chronic pain; Cognition; Data Interpretation, Statistical; Emotional distress; Functional Imaging; Functional Laterality; Gyrus Cinguli - physiopathology; Headache - physiopathology; Humans; Imaging; Magnetic resonance imaging; Magnetic Resonance Imaging - methods; Medicin och hälsovetenskap; Migraine Disorders - physiopathology; Pain; Pain - physiopathology; Pain Processing; Parietal Lobe - physiopathology; Positron emission tomography; Prefrontal Cortex - physiopathology; Thalamus; Thalamus - physiopathology; Tomography; Tomography, Emission-Computed - methods
• ISSN: 0962-8436; 1471-2970
• DOI: 10.1098/rstb.1999.0483

Functional neuroimaging has fundamentally changed our knowledge about the cerebral representation of pain. For the first time it has been possible to delineate the functional anatomy of different aspects of pain in the medial and lateral pain systems in the brain. The rapid developments in imaging methods over the past years have led to a consensus in the description of the central pain responses between different studies and also to a definition of a central pain matrix with specialized subfunctions in man. In the near future we will see studies where a systems perspective allows for a better understanding of the regulatory mechanisms in the higher-order frontal and parietal cortices. Also, pending the development of experimental paradigms, the functional anatomy of the emotional aspects of pain will become better known.