抄録
It is widely known that sensation of the pain is derived from sensory-discriminative factor and emotional factor. Especially in chronic pain, emotional factors and psychosocial backgrounds are more likely to contribute for the patients' discomfort. The aim of this study is to investigate how emotional factor of pain participates in intractable pain. We employed fMRI to compare the brain activations occurring in the orthopaedic neuropathic pain patients with allodynia and normal individuals in response to the visual virtual painful experience. During fMRI scanning, a video demonstrating an actual tactile stimulation of the palm and its imitation were shown to participants. In contrast to normal individuals,allodynia patients also displayed activation of the areas reflecting emotions: frontal lobe and anterior cingulate. These findings suggest that brain have important role in the development and maintaining of peripheral originated chronic painful condition.
