Zhuo Min
1 Center for Neuron and Disease, Frontier Institutes of Science and Technology, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, China.
2 Department of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Mol Pain. 2017 Jan;13:1744806917699212. doi: 10.1177/1744806917699212.
It is documented that sensory transmission, including pain, is subject to endogenous inhibitory and facilitatory modulation at the dorsal horn of the spinal cord. Descending facilitation has received a lot of attention, due to its potentially important roles in chronic pain. Recent investigation using neurobiological approaches has further revealed the link between cortical potentiation and descending facilitation. Cortical-spinal top-down facilitation, including those relayed through brainstem neurons, provides powerful control for pain transmission at the level of the spinal cord. It also provides the neuronal basis to link emotional disorders such as anxiety, depression, and loss of hope to somatosensory pain and sufferings. In this review, I will review a brief history of the discovery of brainstem-spinal descending facilitation and explore new information and hypothesis for descending facilitation in chronic pain.
据记载，包括疼痛在内的感觉传导在脊髓背角会受到内源性抑制和易化调节。下行易化因其在慢性疼痛中潜在的重要作用而备受关注。最近使用神经生物学方法的研究进一步揭示了皮质增强与下行易化之间的联系。皮质-脊髓自上而下的易化，包括通过脑干神经元中继的易化，为脊髓水平的疼痛传导提供了强有力的控制。它还为将焦虑、抑郁和绝望等情绪障碍与躯体感觉疼痛及痛苦联系起来提供了神经基础。在这篇综述中，我将回顾脑干-脊髓下行易化发现的简要历史，并探索慢性疼痛中下行易化的新信息和假说。
