Evidence against pain specificity in the dorsal posterior insula [version 1; referees: 2 approved]
Karen D. Davis,
M. Catherine Bushnell,
Gian Domenico Iannetti,
Keith St. Lawrence,
Robert Coghill
Affiliations
Karen D. Davis
Joint Department of Medical Imaging, University Health Network, Toronto, ON, M5T 2S8, Canada
M. Catherine Bushnell
Pain and Integrative Neuroscience Branch, Division of Intramural Research, National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH), National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, 20892-1302, USA
Gian Domenico Iannetti
Department of Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology, University College London, London, WC1E 6BT, UK
Keith St. Lawrence
Department of Medical Biophysics, The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, N6A 4V2, Canada
Robert Coghill
Department of Anesthesiology, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, Cincinnati, OH, 45229-3026, USA
The search for a “pain centre” in the brain has long eluded neuroscientists. Although many regions of the brain have been shown to respond to painful stimuli, all of these regions also respond to other types of salient stimuli. In a recent paper, Segerdahl et al. (Nature Neuroscience, 2015) claims that the dorsal posterior insula (dpIns) is a pain-specific region based on the observation that the magnitude of regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) fluctuations in the dpIns correlated with the magnitude of evoked pain. However, such a conclusion is, simply, not justified by the experimental evidence provided. Here we discuss three major factors that seriously question this claim.
