Topic: pain perception

Pain perception is a warning signal enabling animals to preserve their body integrity. When pain persists over time, the brain needs to learn to predict its temporal evolution in order to minimize harm. Whereas several studies have already shown the effects of experience and expectations on responses to isolated nociceptive stimuli using axiomatic approaches, it remains largely unknown how individuals can learn to predict a stream of nociceptive events and how these processes are implemented in the brain. To clarify these aspects, we exposed healthy human participants (n = 31) to probabilistic

The placebo and nocebo effects highlight the importance of expectations in modulating pain perception. Yet, we don't need an external source of information to form expectations about pain. The brain can learn to predict pain in a more fundamental way, simply by experiencing fluctuating, non-random streams of noxious inputs, and extracting their temporal regularities. This process is called statistical learning. Here we address two key open questions: (1) does statistical learning modulate pain perception? and (2) is it affected in people with chronic musculoskeletal pain? In a first experiment

The ability to experience pain is old in evolutionary terms. It is an experience shared across species. Acute pain is the body’s alarm system, and as such it is a good thing. Pain that persists beyond normal tissue healing time (3-4 months) is defined as chronic – it is the system gone wrong and it is not a good thing. Chronic pain has recently been classified as both a symptom and disease in its own right. It is one of the largest medical health problems worldwide with one in five adults diagnosed with the condition. The brain is key to the experience of pain and pain relief. This is the plac

Impaired cognition and pain after surgery contribute to prolonged hospital stays and increased mortality rates. Thus, the development of preemptive algorithms for reducing their impact should be prioritized. The main objectives of the present study were to evaluate the efficiency of using virtual reality (VR) to treat postoperative cognitive decline and pain perception. The study was a prospective, monocentric, clinical study that included 51 patients who have undergone major abdominal surgery. The patients were divided into two groups: Control (n = 25) and VR (n = 26). The VR sessions consist