The impact of the stimulation method on differences in pain thresholds and brain responses between chronic pain patients and healthy controls

摘要

In this issue you will find a paper by Franz et al. (2014) titled 'Laser heat hyperalgesia is not a feature of nonspecific chronic low back pain'. In this study, 16 patients with chronic back pain and 16 healthy controls were stimulated with noxious laser heat. Laser heat pain thresholds and nociceptive laser-evoked electrical brain potentials following skin stimulation of the pain-affected back and the pain-free abdomen were assessed. The surprising results of this study are that there were no significant differences between the groups in the laser heat pain thresholds and the nociceptive laser-evoked electrical brain potentials. This is in contrast to a large number of studies in different chronic pain disorders (e.g. fibromyalgia or chronic back pain) which report altered or more specifically augmented brain responses to painful stimulation.