Department of Psychology, University of Miami, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Miami, USA.
Neuropsychologia. 2021 Mar 12;153:107766. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2021.107766. Epub 2021 Jan 24.
The relationship between pain and cognition has primarily been investigated in patients with chronic pain and healthy participants undergoing experimental pain. Recently, there has been interest in understanding the disruptive effects of non-experimental pain in otherwise healthy individuals. Recent studies suggest that healthy individuals reporting pain also demonstrate decrements in working memory (WM) performance, however factors contributing to this relationship remain poorly understood. The present study examined the association between pain and WM in a large community-based sample of healthy individuals and investigated whether self-reported affective distress and medial frontal cortex activity might help to explain this relationship. To address these research questions, a large publicly available dataset from the Human Connectome Project (N = 416) was sourced and structural equation modeling was utilized to examine relationships between pain intensity experienced over the past 7 days, self-reported affective distress, performance on a WM (n-back) task, and task-related activation in the medial frontal cortex. Examining participants who reported non-zero pain intensity in the past 7 days (n = 228), we found a direct negative association between pain intensity and performance on the WM n-back task, consistent with prior findings. Self-reported affective distress was not associated with WM performance. Additionally, pain intensity was indirectly associated with WM performance via WM task-related activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Our findings suggest that pain experienced in everyday life by otherwise healthy individuals may directly impact WM performance. Furthermore, WM task-related increases in vmPFC activity may be a factor contributing to this relationship.
疼痛与认知之间的关系主要在慢性疼痛患者和接受实验性疼痛的健康参与者中进行了研究。最近，人们对理解健康个体中非实验性疼痛的破坏作用产生了兴趣。最近的研究表明，报告疼痛的健康个体的工作记忆 (WM) 表现也会下降，但是导致这种关系的因素仍知之甚少。本研究在一个大型的健康人群社区样本中考察了疼痛与 WM 之间的关系，并调查了自我报告的情感困扰和内侧前额叶皮层活动是否有助于解释这种关系。为了解决这些研究问题，从人类连接组计划 (HCP) 中获取了一个大型的公共可用数据集，并利用结构方程模型来检验过去 7 天内经历的疼痛强度、自我报告的情感困扰、WM (n-回) 任务的表现以及内侧前额叶皮层的与任务相关的激活之间的关系。在检查过去 7 天内报告有非零疼痛强度的参与者(n=228)时，我们发现疼痛强度与 WM n-回任务的表现之间存在直接的负相关，这与先前的发现一致。自我报告的情感困扰与 WM 表现无关。此外，疼痛强度通过腹内侧前额叶皮层 (vmPFC) 的 WM 任务相关活动与 WM 表现呈间接相关。我们的研究结果表明，健康个体日常生活中的疼痛可能直接影响 WM 表现。此外，vmPFC 活动中 WM 任务相关的增加可能是导致这种关系的一个因素。
