Matthias ZunhammerUniversity Hospital Essen | UK Essen · Clinic for Neurology
Matthias Zunhammer
Dr. phil. Psychology, M.Sc. Neurosciences
About
34
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
October 2014 - present
May 2010 - October 2014
April 2010 - April 2012
Publications
Publications (34)
Sensitivity to pain shows a remarkable interindividual variance that has been reported to both forecast and accompany various clinical pain conditions. Although pain thresholds have been reported to be associated to brain morphology, it is still unclear how well these findings replicate in independent data and whether they are powerful enough to pr...
Placebo effects substantially contribute to analgesic treatment outcomes and might be leveraged to enhance gold‐standard treatments. The taste of oral medications has been proposed to boost placebo effects. Here, we aimed at estimating in how far the taste of an oral medication enhances placebo analgesia. We conducted a randomized, double‐blind, be...
Pain sensitivity is known to considerably vary across individuals. While the variability in pain has been linked to structural neural correlates, it is still unclear how well these findings replicate in independent data and whether they are powerful enough to provide reliable pain sensitivity predictions on the individual level. In this study, we c...
Background
The placebo effect as the symptom improvement following inert treatments is a fixed component of RCTs to differentiate between specific effects of the tested pharmacological substance from other unspecific effects. The PINgPOng study was set up to analyze the influence of a study team trained to either minimize the placebo response and o...
Previous studies have described the structure and function of the insular cortex in terms of spatially continuous gradients. Here we assess how spatial features of insular resting state functional organization correspond to individual pain sensitivity. From a previous multicenter study, we included 107 healthy participants, who underwent resting st...
We conducted a randomized, double-blind, between-group study to investigate how the taste of oral medication affects placebo analgesia. Over three sub-studies, 318 healthy volunteers (297 included) were subjected to experimental tonic cold water pain (cold pressor test) before and after receiving taste-neutral (water), bitter (quinine), sweet (sacc...
Acute pain captures attentional resources and interferes with ongoing cognitive processes, including memory encoding. Despite broad clinical implications of this interruptive function of pain for the pathophysiology and treatment of chronic pain conditions, existing knowledge exclusively relies on studies using somatic pain models. Visceral pain is...
Pain thresholds vary considerably across individuals and are influenced by a number of behavioral, genetic and neurobiological factors. However, the neurobiological underpinnings that account for individual differences remain to be fully elucidated. In this study, we used voxel‐based morphometry (VBM) and graph theory, specifically the local cluste...
The cold pressor test (CPT) is widely implemented and offers a simple, experimental acute pain model utilizing cold pain. Previous trials have frequently paired the CPT with opioids in order to investigate the mechanisms underlying pharmacological analgesia, due to their known analgesic efficacy. However, opioid side effects may lead to unblinding...
The brain systems underlying placebo analgesia are insufficiently understood. Here we performed a systematic, participant-level meta-analysis of experimental functional neuroimaging studies of evoked pain under stimulus-intensity-matched placebo and control conditions, encompassing 603 healthy participants from 20 (out of 28 eligible) studies. We f...
Individual differences in pain perception are of interest in basic and clinical research as altered pain sensitivity is both a characteristic and a risk factor for many pain conditions. It is, however, unclear how individual sensitivity to pain is reflected in the pain-free resting-state brain activity and functional connectivity. Here, we identify...
Individual differences in pain perception are of key interest in basic and clinical research as altered pain sensitivity is both a characteristic and a risk factor for many pain conditions. It is, however, unclear how individual susceptibility to pain is reflected in the pain-free resting-state brain activity and functional connectivity.
Here, we i...
To the Editor Linnman and Morales-Quezada recently questioned why the neurologic pain signature (NPS)¹ is largely unresponsive to placebo treatment.² They suggest it may be because the NPS was trained on pain ratings elicited by heat applied to the left forearm,¹ but tested on studies involving various body sites and stimulation types.² Predictive...
The threshold-free cluster enhancement (TFCE) approach integrates cluster information into voxel-wise statistical inference to enhance detectability of neuroimaging signal. Despite the significantly increased sensitivity, the application of TFCE is limited by several factors: (i) generalisation to data structures, like brain network connectivity da...
Rationale:
Better means to control placebo effects are key to optimizing treatment outcomes. Dopamine-based reward and learning mechanisms have been hypothesized to drive placebo effects. Here, we tested whether dopamine augmentation can modulate learned placebo effects.
Methods:
We performed a randomized, double-blind parallel group study with...
Importance
Placebo effects reduce pain and contribute to clinical analgesia, but after decades of research, it remains unclear whether placebo treatments mainly affect nociceptive processes or other processes associated with pain evaluation.
Objective
We conducted a systematic, participant-level meta-analysis to test the effect of placebo treatmen...
The success of medical treatment, especially for subjectively evaluated conditions such as pain, is usually influenced by a patienttextquoterights expectations. In particular, patients who have been exposed to unsuccessful treatment attempts in the past often do not respond as strongly to subsequent treatments. To assess whether a change in drug ro...
The hormone oxytocin has been hypothesized to influence the emotional dimension of pain. This randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind, crossover study explored whether intranasal oxytocin and emotional context can affect heat pain perception in 30 healthy male volunteers. After receiving 36 IU oxytocin or placebo, participants underwent functi...
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The relationship between glutamate and γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) levels in the living human brain and pain sensitivity is unknown. Combined glutamine/glutamate (Glx), as well as GABA levels can be measured in vivo with single-voxel proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy. In this cross-sectional study, we aimed at determining whether Glx and/or GAB...
Objective:
The present study aimed at investigating whether chronic pain patients are impaired in Theory of Mind (ToM), or Emotional Awareness.
Methods:
Thirty inpatients suffering from chronic somatoform pain, as well as thirty healthy controls matched for age, sex, and education were recruited. ToM abilities were measured using the Frith-Happé...
Academic exam stress is known to compromise sleep quality and alter drug consumption in university students. Here we evaluated if sleeping problems and changes in legal drug consumption during exam stress are interrelated. We used the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) to survey sleep quality before, during, and after an academic exam period in...
Objective: Intranasal oxytocin has been shown to affect human social and emotional processing, but its potential to affect pain remains elusive. This randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind, crossover trial investigated the effect of intranasal oxytocin on the perception and processing of noxious experimental heat in 36 healthy male volunteers...
Objective:
The etiology of somatization is incompletely understood, but could be elucidated by models of psychosocial stress. Academic exam stress has effectively been applied as a naturalistic stress model, however its effect on somatization symptoms according to ICD-10 and DSM-IV criteria has not been reported so far. Baseline associations betwe...
Unlabelled:
Deep and slow breathing (DSB) is a central part of behavioral exercises used for acute and chronic pain management. Its mechanisms of action are incompletely understood.
Objectives:
1) To test the effects of breathing frequency on experimental pain perception in a dose dependent fashion. 2) To test the effects of breathing frequency...
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) studies reported changes in motor evoked potential amplitude after acupuncture needling both at traditional acupoints and non-acupoints. However, the effects of needle penetration per se have not yet been investigated with TMS. The present study aimed at exploring effects of deep manual acupuncture needling c...
Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) of motor and prefrontal cortex has been shown to modulate pain perception. Even though evidence suggests an involvement of cerebellar structures in pain processing, the effect of rTMS over the cerebellum on pain perception has not yet been investigated.
This study aimed to test the effects of rTMS...
Background: Acupuncture has been suggested to exert its controversial therapeutic effects by modulation of the peripheral and central nervous system. However, the central nervous effects of acupuncture are still a matter of debate, since few direct neurophysiological measures using proper placebo conditions have been reported. Aim: Modulations of C...
Valproate is widely used in the treatment of epilepsy, bipolar disorder, and chronic pain disorders, but its exact mechanisms of action is still incompletely understood.
Here we used transcranial magnetic stimulation to explore effects of a single dose of 800 mg valproate on motor cortex excitability in healthy volunteers.
Motor threshold, peripher...
Studies of the behavioral effects of alcohol in humans and rodent models have implicated a number of neurological pathways and genes. Separate studies have shown that certain regions of the brain are involved in behavioral responses to exercise. The aim of this study was to determine whether mice which normally voluntarily consume high amounts of a...