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Publications (23)
Pain demands attention, yet pain can be reduced by focusing attention elsewhere. The neural processes involved in this robust psychophysical phenomenon, attentional analgesia, are still being defined. Our previous fMRI study linked activity in the brainstem triad of locus coeruleus (LC), rostral ventromedial medulla (RVM) and periaqueductal grey (P...
Extinction of Pavlovian conditioning is a complex process that involves brain regions such as the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), the amygdala and the locus coeruleus. In particular, noradrenaline (NA) coming from the locus coeruleus has been recently shown to play a different role in two subregions of the mPFC, the prelimbic (PL) and the infralim...
Exposure to drug-associated cues to induce extinction is a useful strategy to contrast cue-induced drug seeking. Norepinephrine (NE) transmission in medial prefrontal cortex has a role in the acquisition and extinction of conditioned place preference induced by amphetamine. We have reported recently that NE in prelimbic cortex delays extinction of...
INTRODUCTION
Hand motor control depends on intricate brain-spinal cord interactions that regulate muscle activity. Hand function can be disrupted by injury to the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nerves leading to weakness and impaired coordination. Functional MRI (fMRI) can map motor-related neural activity and potentially characterize the mecha...
Converging lines of preclinical and clinical research indicate that females, in stark contrast to males, display an increased prevalence of chronic pain. Females also demonstrate weaker analgesic efficacy in response to opioid therapies when compared with males. These sex-specific differences may be driven by dimorphic endogenous opioidergic respon...
Empathy is characterized as the ability to share one's experience and is associated with altruism. Previous work using blood oxygen level–dependent (BOLD) functional MRI (fMRI) has found that empathy is associated with greater activation in brain mechanisms supporting mentalizing (temporoparietal junction), salience (anterior cingulate cortex; insu...
Chronic low back pain (cLBP) is the most prevalent chronic pain condition. There are no treatments that haven been found to directly assuage evoked cLBP. To this extent, mindfulness-meditation is a promising pain therapy. Yet, it is unclear if meditation can be utilized to directly attenuate evoked chronic pain through endogenous opioids. A double-...
Withdrawal Statement
The authors discovered an error in the primary analysis and have withdrawn the results from this version of the investigation.
Objectives
Breathing rate and pain are influenced by a spectrum of cognitive, affective, and physiological interactions. Yet, it is unknown if an individual’s resting breathing rate is associated with pain.
Methods
Continuous cerebral blood flow (CBF) and respiration rate were collected in 74 healthy participants during innocuous (35 °C) and noxio...
Law enforcement officers are at risk of decreased mental and physical health due to the high demands and stressful nature of police work. Self-regulatory cognitive training may be particularly efficacious for law enforcement officers. The present study examined the feasibility and efficacy of three standardized, 8-week mindfulness-based interventio...
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the human spinal cord faces many challenges, such as signal loss due to local magnetic field inhomogeneities. This issue can be addressed with slice-specific z-shimming, which compensates for the dephasing effect of the inhomogeneities using a slice-specific gradient pulse. Here, we aim to address out...
For millenniums, mindfulness was believed to diminish pain by reducing the influence of self-appraisals of noxious sensations. Today, mindfulness meditation is a highly popular and effective pain therapy that is believed to engage multiple, nonplacebo-related mechanisms to attenuate pain. Recent evidence suggests that mindfulness meditation-induced...
Mindfulness meditation-induced pain relief is more effective and mechanistically distinct from placebo. Machine-learned multivariate patterns are highly specific and predictive of subjective pain responses. The Neurological Pain Signature (NPS) is a multivoxel pattern that is specific to direct nociceptive input. The Stimulus Intensity Independent...
The subjective experience of pain is driven by multiple physiological and psychological mechanisms supported by a dynamic interplay between low-level afferent input and higher-order cerebral mechanisms. Volitional changes in respiration rate predict changes in pain. However, it is unknown if naturally slower breathing rate is associated with lower...
Objectives
Gun violence is a significant problem in the United States of America. Gun violence produces lifelong psychological adversity, trauma, and grief. In the face of this epidemic, efficacious therapies that assuage gun violence-based trauma and negative health are lacking.
Methods
The proposed, longitudinal pilot experiment examined the eff...
Pain perception is decreased by shifting attentional focus away from a threatening event. This attentional analgesia engages parallel descending control pathways from anterior cingulate (ACC) to locus coeruleus, and ACC to periaqueductal grey (PAG) - rostral ventromedial medulla (RVM), indicating possible roles for noradrenergic or opioidergic neur...
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the human spinal cord faces many challenges, such as signal loss due to local magnetic field inhomogeneities. This issue can be addressed with slice-specific z-shimming, which compensates for the dephasing effect of the inhomogeneities using a slice-specific gradient pulse. Here, we aim to address out...
Pain perception is decreased by shifting attentional focus away from a threatening event. This attentional analgesia engages parallel descending control pathways from anterior cingulate (ACC) to locus coeruleus, and ACC to periaqueductal grey (PAG) − rostral ventromedial medulla (RVM), indicating possible roles for noradrenergic or opioidergic neur...
Fibromyalgia is a prevalent pain condition that is associated with cognitive impairments including in attention, memory, and executive processing. It has been proposed that fibromyalgia may be caused by altered central pain processing characterised by a loss of endogenous pain modulation. We tested whether attentional analgesia, where cognitive eng...
Pain perception is diminished when attention is diverted. Our previous human fMRI study, using a 2x2 factorial design with thermal stimuli and concurrent visual attention task, linked the brainstem triad of locus coeruleus (LC), rostroventromedial medulla (RVM) and periaqueductal grey (PAG) to attentional analgesia. This study was repeated with a l...
