• Pablo de la Coba, Stephen Bruehl, Stefan Duschek, and Gustavo A Reyes Del Paso.
• Department of Psychology, University of Jaén, Spain. Electronic address: pcoba@ujaen.es.
• Int J Psychophysiol. 2018 Dec 1; 134: 79-85.

IntroductionResting blood pressure (BP) has been found to be inversely associated with evoked pain responsiveness in healthy populations. However, some reports suggest that BP-related pain modulation may be dysfunctional in chronic pain patients. This study examined whether BP-related pain modulation, indexed by both static and dynamic evoked pain responses, is altered in fibromyalgia (FM) patients compared to pain-free individuals.MethodPain threshold and tolerance as static evoked pain measures and slowly repeated evoked pain (SREP) as a dynamic evoked pain index were measured in 30 FM patients and 27 healthy controls. BP was continuously recorded throughout a 5 minute pre-pain rest period.ResultsSREP sensitization was observed only in the FM group. Higher BP predicted elevated pain threshold and tolerance in healthy individuals, but not in FM. Conversely, BP was inversely associated with SREP sensitization in FM whereas no association was found in healthy controls.ConclusionsStatic evoked pain measures suggested BP-related pain inhibitory dysfunction in FM. In contrast, for pain sensitization as indexed by SREP, FM displayed the expected BP-related inhibitory effects. BP-related pain modulation is manifested in FM differentially for static versus dynamic pain indicators. Use of both types of evoked pain measures may be valuable in the study of mechanisms underlying altered pain modulatory systems in FM.Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

25 keywords...

hide…