Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, FMRIB, Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Department of Neurology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany
Anne Stankewitz
Department of Neurology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany
Anderson M Winkler
Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, FMRIB, Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Emotion and Development Branch, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, United States
Stephanie Irving
Department of Neurology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany
Viktor Witkovský
Department of Theoretical Methods, Institute of Measurement Science, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovakia
Irene Tracey
Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, FMRIB, Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
We investigated how the attenuation of pain with cognitive interventions affects brain connectivity using neuroimaging and a whole brain novel analysis approach. While receiving tonic cold pain, 20 healthy participants performed three different pain attenuation strategies during simultaneous collection of functional imaging data at seven tesla. Participants were asked to rate their pain after each trial. We related the trial-by-trial variability of the attenuation performance to the trial-by-trial functional connectivity strength change of brain data. Across all conditions, we found that a higher performance of pain attenuation was predominantly associated with higher functional connectivity. Of note, we observed an association between low pain and high connectivity for regions that belong to brain regions long associated with pain processing, the insular and cingulate cortices. For one of the cognitive strategies (safe place), the performance of pain attenuation was explained by diffusion tensor imaging metrics of increased white matter integrity.
