Human brain mapping
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Human brain mapping · Sep 2014
Placebo analgesia and reward processing: integrating genetics, personality, and intrinsic brain activity.
Our expectations about an event can strongly shape our subjective evaluation and actual experience of events. This ability, applied to the modulation of pain, has the potential to affect therapeutic analgesia substantially and constitutes a foundation for non-pharmacological pain relief. A typical example of such modulation is the placebo effect. ⋯ In a fitted regression model, we found the ReHo in the ventral striatum, COMT genotype, and Openness scores accounted for 59% of the variance in the change in pain ratings. The model was further tested using a separate data set from the same study. Our findings demonstrate the potential of combining resting-state connectivity, genetic information, and personality to predict placebo effect.
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Human brain mapping · Sep 2014
Hemispheric lateralization of topological organization in structural brain networks.
The study on structural brain asymmetries in healthy individuals plays an important role in our understanding of the factors that modulate cognitive specialization in the brain. Here, we used fiber tractography to reconstruct the left and right hemispheric networks of a large cohort of 346 healthy participants (20-86 years) and performed a graph theoretical analysis to investigate this brain laterality from a network perspective. ⋯ Finally, we observed significant gender differences in measures of global connectivity. By analyzing the structural hemispheric brain networks, we have provided new insights into understanding the neuroanatomical basis of lateralized brain functions.