• Pain Med · Jul 2023

    Preserved distraction analgesia but greater impact of pain on task performance in old compared with young subjects.

    • Ségolène Lithfous, Olivier Després, Julia Devanne, Thierry Pebayle, and André Dufour.
    • Université de Strasbourg, CNRS, LNCA UMR 7364, Strasbourg, France.
    • Pain Med. 2023 Jul 5; 24 (7): 818828818-828.

    ObjectiveIn this study, we compared two working memory conditions to study the analgesic effect of a distraction in elderly vs young people and the effect of pain on performance on the distracting task.MethodsYounger (n=27) and older (n= 34) subjects performed 1- and 2-Back working memory tasks, representing low and high cognitive loads, respectively. Infrequent, brief hot nociceptive and cold non-nociceptive stimulations were delivered 100 ms before visual N-Back stimuli. Contact heat-evoked and cold-evoked potentials (N2P2 component) were analyzed in the absence of cognitive tasks and during the N-Back tasks. We compared the pain and cold intensity ratings and reaction times in trials preceded by nociceptive and cold stimulations and in trials not preceded by thermal stimulations between groups and between N-Back conditions.ResultsIn both groups, performing the 1- and 2-Back working memory tasks reduced the perceived intensity of nociceptive and cold stimuli. In elderly subjects performing 2-Back memory tasks, response times to trials after nociceptive stimulation were longer than those to trials after cold or non-stimulation. By contrast, thermal stimulations had no effect on reaction times in young subjects. The amplitude of the N2P2 component was lower in the older than in the younger group in the absence of a cognitive task. In the older group, N-Back tasks had no effect on the N2P2 amplitude, whereas they reduced N2P2 amplitude in the young.ConclusionDistraction analgesia is preserved in elderly subjects. However, this successful pain modulation seems to be accompanied by performance costs in the distracting tasks.© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Academy of Pain Medicine. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

      Pubmed     Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…