Departamento de Psicoloxía Clínica e Psicobioloxía, Facultade de Psicoloxía, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; Psychological Neuroscience Lab, Psychology Research Centre, School of Psychology, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal.
Departamento de Psicoloxía Clínica e Psicobioloxía, Facultade de Psicoloxía, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
Neuroimage. 2020 Dec;223:117266. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.117266. Epub 2020 Aug 25.
Fibromyalgia (FM) is a chronic condition characterized by widespread pain of unknown etiology associated with alterations in the central nervous system. Although previous studies demonstrated altered patterns of brain activity during pain processing in patients with FM, alterations in spontaneous brain oscillations, in terms of functional connectivity or microstates, have been barely explored so far. Here we recorded the EEG from 43 patients with FM and 51 healthy controls during open-eyes resting-state. We analyzed the functional connectivity between different brain networks computing the phase lag index after group Independent Component Analysis, and also performed an EEG microstates analysis. Patients with FM showed increased beta band connectivity between different brain networks and alterations in some microstates parameters (specifically lower occurrence and coverage of microstate class C). We speculate that the observed alterations in spontaneous EEG may suggest the dominance of endogenous top-down influences; this could be related to limited processing of novel external events and the deterioration of flexible behavior and cognitive control frequently reported for FM. These findings provide the first evidence of alterations in long-distance phase connectivity and microstate indices at rest, and represent progress towards the understanding of the pathophysiology of fibromyalgia and the identification of novel biomarkers for its diagnosis.
纤维肌痛(FM)是一种慢性疾病,其特征为广泛的不明病因疼痛,与中枢神经系统的改变有关。尽管先前的研究表明,在 FM 患者的疼痛处理过程中,大脑活动模式发生了改变,但迄今为止,自发性脑振荡的改变,无论是在功能连接还是微状态方面,都几乎没有得到探索。在这里,我们在睁眼静息状态下记录了 43 名 FM 患者和 51 名健康对照者的 EEG。我们通过组独立成分分析后计算相位滞后指数,分析了不同脑网络之间的功能连接,还进行了 EEG 微状态分析。FM 患者在不同脑网络之间的β波段连接增加,并且一些微状态参数发生了改变(特别是微状态 C 类的出现和覆盖减少)。我们推测,自发 EEG 中观察到的改变可能表明内源性自上而下影响的主导地位;这可能与对外界新事件的处理能力有限以及经常报告的 FM 患者的灵活行为和认知控制恶化有关。这些发现提供了在静息状态下长程相位连接和微状态指数改变的第一个证据,并代表了在理解纤维肌痛的病理生理学和确定其诊断的新生物标志物方面的进展。