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- Title
The Human Operculo-Insular Cortex Is Pain-Preferentially but Not Pain-Exclusively Activated by Trigeminal and Olfactory Stimuli.
- Authors
Lötsch, Jörn; Walter, Carmen; Felden, Lisa; Nöth, Ulrike; Deichmann, Ralf; Oertel, Bruno G.
- Abstract
Increasing evidence about the central nervous representation of pain in the brain suggests that the operculo-insular cortex is a crucial part of the pain matrix. The pain-specificity of a brain region may be tested by administering nociceptive stimuli while controlling for unspecific activations by administering non-nociceptive stimuli. We applied this paradigm to nasal chemosensation, delivering trigeminal or olfactory stimuli, to verify the pain-specificity of the operculo-insular cortex. In detail, brain activations due to intranasal stimulation induced by non-nociceptive olfactory stimuli of hydrogen sulfide (5 ppm) or vanillin (0.8 ppm) were used to mask brain activations due to somatosensory, clearly nociceptive trigeminal stimulations with gaseous carbon dioxide (75% v/v). Functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) images were recorded from 12 healthy volunteers in a 3T head scanner during stimulus administration using an event-related design. We found that significantly more activations following nociceptive than non-nociceptive stimuli were localized bilaterally in two restricted clusters in the brain containing the primary and secondary somatosensory areas and the insular cortices consistent with the operculo-insular cortex. However, these activations completely disappeared when eliminating activations associated with the administration of olfactory stimuli, which were small but measurable. While the present experiments verify that the operculo-insular cortex plays a role in the processing of nociceptive input, they also show that it is not a pain-exclusive brain region and allow, in the experimental context, for the interpretation that the operculo-insular cortex splay a major role in the detection of and responding to salient events, whether or not these events are nociceptive or painful.
- Subjects
DISCOMYCETES; CENTRAL nervous system; SOMATOSENSORY evoked potentials; MAGNETIC resonance imaging; HYDROGEN sulfide; CARBON dioxide; VANILLIN
- Publication
PLoS ONE, 2012, Vol 7, Issue 4, p1
- ISSN
1932-6203
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1371/journal.pone.0034798