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The human amygdala and pain: evidence from neuroimaging

PainSci » bibliography » Simons et al 2014
updated
Tags: mind

One page on PainSci cites Simons 2014: Chronic Pain as a Conditioned Behaviour

PainSci notes on Simons 2014:

This is a review of studies of role of the amygdala in processing pain. The amygdala is a brain region associated with memory, emotion (most notably fear and anxiety), and decision-making. And it “lights up” (the inevitable metaphor) differently in pain patients than healthy people, and there are even distinctive differences between types of pain. For instance, the authors report that clinical pain (as opposed to experimentally induced pain) results in activation of the laterobasal region, which is “suggestive of the cognitive-affective overlay present among individuals suffering from chronic pain.”

The most prosaic interpretation of this is not that the amygdala is actually modulating pain (which cannot be shown by this data), but just that people have thoughts and feelings about it. Imagine!

original abstract Abstracts here may not perfectly match originals, for a variety of technical and practical reasons. Some abstacts are truncated for my purposes here, if they are particularly long-winded and unhelpful. I occasionally add clarifying notes. And I make some minor corrections.

The amygdala, a small deep brain structure involved in behavioral processing through interactions with other brain regions, has garnered increased attention in recent years in relation to pain processing. As pain is a multidimensional experience that encompasses physical sensation, affect, and cognition, the amygdala is well suited to play a part in this process. Multiple neuroimaging studies of pain in humans have reported activation in the amygdala. Here, we summarize these studies by performing a coordinate-based meta-analysis within experimentally induced and clinical pain studies using an activation likelihood estimate analysis. The results are presented in relation to locations of peak activation within and outside of amygdala subregions. The majority of studies identified coordinates consistent with human amygdala cytoarchitecture indicating reproducibility in neuroanatomical labeling across labs, analysis methods, and imaging modalities. Differences were noted between healthy and clinical pain studies: in clinical pain studies, peak activation was located in the laterobasal region, suggestive of the cognitive-affective overlay present among individuals suffering from chronic pain; while the less understood superficial region of the amygdala was prominent among experimental pain studies. Taken together, these findings suggest several important directions for further research exploring the amygdala's role in pain processing.

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