Chronic Pain and Fatigue Research Center, Department of Anesthesiology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, United States; Neuroscience Graduate Program, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, United States; Center for Consciousness Science, Department of Anesthesiology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, United States.
Chronic Pain and Fatigue Research Center, Department of Anesthesiology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, United States.
Neuroimage. 2021 Feb 1;226:117504. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.117504. Epub 2020 Oct 24.
Neuroimaging has enhanced our understanding of the neural correlates of pain. Yet, how neural circuits interact and contribute to persistent pain remain largely unknown. Here, we investigate the mesoscale organization of the brain through intrinsic functional communities generated from resting state functional MRI data from two independent datasets, a discovery cohort of 43 Fibromyalgia (FM) patients and 20 healthy controls (HC) as well as a replication sample of 34 FM patients and 21 HC. Using normalized mutual information, we found that the global network architecture in chronic pain patients is less stable (more variable). Subsequent analyses of node community assignment revealed the composition of the communities differed between FM and HC. Furthermore, differences in network organization were associated with the changes in the composition of communities between patients with varying levels of clinical pain. Together, this work demonstrates that intrinsic network communities differ substantially between patients with FM and controls. These differences may represent a novel aspect of the pathophysiology of chronic nociplastic pain.
神经影像学增强了我们对疼痛神经相关的理解。然而，神经回路如何相互作用并导致持续性疼痛在很大程度上仍然未知。在这里，我们通过来自两个独立数据集的静息状态功能磁共振成像数据生成的内在功能社区来研究大脑的中尺度组织，一个是包含 43 名纤维肌痛 (FM) 患者和 20 名健康对照 (HC) 的发现队列，另一个是包含 34 名 FM 患者和 21 名 HC 的复制样本。使用归一化互信息，我们发现慢性疼痛患者的全局网络结构不太稳定（更具可变性）。随后对节点社区分配的分析表明，FM 和 HC 之间的社区组成不同。此外，网络组织的差异与患者之间临床疼痛程度不同时社区组成的变化有关。总的来说，这项工作表明，纤维肌痛患者和对照组之间的内在网络社区有很大的不同。这些差异可能代表慢性痛觉过敏疼痛病理生理学的一个新方面。
