• Daniel E Harper, Eric Ichesco, Andrew Schrepf, Johnson P Hampson, Daniel J Clauw, Tobias Schmidt-Wilcke, Richard E Harris, and Steven E Harte.
• Chronic Pain and Fatigue Research Center, Department of Anesthesiology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Electronic address: harperd@med.umich.edu.
• J Pain. 2018 Jun 1; 19 (6): 635.e1-635.e15.

AbstractConditioned pain modulation (CPM), a psychophysical paradigm that is commonly used to infer the integrity of endogenous pain-altering systems by observation of the effect of one noxious stimulus on another, has previously identified deficient endogenous analgesia in fibromyalgia (FM) and other chronic pain conditions. The mechanisms underlying this deficiency, be they insufficient inhibition and/or active facilitation, are largely unknown. The present cross-sectional study used a combination of behavioral CPM testing, voxel-based morphometry, and resting state functional connectivity to identify neural correlates of CPM in healthy controls (HC; n = 14) and FM patients (n = 15), and to probe for differences that could explain the pain-facilitative CPM that was observed in our patient sample. Voxel-based morphometry identified a cluster encompassing the periaqueductal gray (PAG) that contained significantly less gray matter volume in FM patients. Higher resting connectivity between this cluster and cortical pain processing regions was associated with more efficient inhibitory CPM in both groups, whereas PAG connectivity with the dorsal pons was associated with greater CPM inhibition only in HC. Greater PAG connectivity to the caudal pons/rostral medulla, which was pain-inhibitory in HC, was associated with pain facilitation in FM patients.Copyright © 2018 The American Pain Society. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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