• Jiro Kurata.
• Masui. 2014 Jul 1;63(7):737-42.

AbstractMuch evidence has been accumulated on the cerebral mechanisms of pain perception owing to rapid and diverse development in magnetic resonance imaging and its analysis techniques over the last decades. In addition to pain-evoked cerebral activities, our knowledge now extends into chronic pain-associated alterations in cerebral connectivity over networks and in gray matter density, which characterize cerebral steady-state pathological properties underlying chronic pain conditions. A dynamic cerebral model for chronification of pain is presented, in which a bottom-up nociception via the lateral system leads to a reactive, top-down hyperactivity of the medial system, and eventually to both functional and anatomical degeneration of pain modulatory mechanisms and reward systems. All such biomarkers of "chronic pain brain" revealed by neuroimaging will hopefully help us in diagnosis of chronic pain and evaluation of therapeutics for each patient on an outpatient basis.

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