European journal of pain : EJP
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Understanding the mechanisms behind the influence of expectation and context on pain perception is crucial for improving analgesic treatments. Prediction error (PE) signals how much a noxious stimulus deviates from expectation and is therefore crucial for our understanding of pain perception. It is thought that the brain engages in 'adaptive coding' of pain PE, such that sensitivity to unexpected outcomes is modulated by contextual information. While there is behavioural evidence that pain is coded adaptively, and evidence that reward PE signals are coded adaptively, controversy remains regarding the underlying neural mechanism of adaptively-coded pain PEs. ⋯ Although there is behavioural evidence that pain is coded adaptively, the neural mechanisms serving this process are not well understood. This study used functional MRI to provide the first evidence that the left dorsal anterior insula, an area associated with aversive learning, responds to pain in a manner consistent with the adaptive coding of pain prediction error. This study aids our understanding of the neural basis of subjective pain representation, and thus can contribute to the advancement of analgesic treatments.
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Pain can have a significant impact on an individual's life, as it has both cognitive and affective consequences. However, our understanding of how pain affects social cognition is limited. Previous studies have shown that pain, as an alarm stimulus, can disrupt cognitive processing when focal attention is required, but whether pain also affects task-irrelevant perceptual processing remains unclear. ⋯ The observed alterations in face perception due to pain may have consequences for real-life interactions, as fast and automatic encoding of facial emotions is important for social interactions.
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Ubiquitin-mediated degradation of the Mas-related G protein-coupled receptor C (MrgC) reduces the number of receptors. However, the specific deubiquitinating enzyme antagonize this process has not been reported. In this study, we investigated the effect of ubiquitin-specific protease-48 (USP48) on bone cancer pain (BCP) and its effect on MrgC. ⋯ Our finding may provide an important theoretical basis as well as an intervention target for clinical development of drugs for BCP.