Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, School of Medicine, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany.
Department of Psychiatry, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States.
Pain. 2023 Jan 1;164(1):e10-e24. doi: 10.1097/j.pain.0000000000002681. Epub 2022 May 13.
Neuroimaging is a powerful tool to investigate potential associations between chronic pain and brain structure. However, the proliferation of studies across diverse chronic pain syndromes and heterogeneous results challenges data integration and interpretation. We conducted a preregistered anatomical likelihood estimate meta-analysis on structural magnetic imaging studies comparing patients with chronic pain and healthy controls. Specifically, we investigated a broad range of measures of brain structure as well as specific alterations in gray matter and cortical thickness. A total of 7849 abstracts of experiments published between January 1, 1990, and April 26, 2021, were identified from 8 databases and evaluated by 2 independent reviewers. Overall, 103 experiments with a total of 5075 participants met the preregistered inclusion criteria. After correction for multiple comparisons using the gold-standard family-wise error correction ( P < 0.05), no significant differences associated with chronic pain were found. However, exploratory analyses using threshold-free cluster enhancement revealed several spatially distributed clusters showing structural alterations in chronic pain. Most of the clusters coincided with regions implicated in nociceptive processing including the amygdala, thalamus, hippocampus, insula, anterior cingulate cortex, and inferior frontal gyrus. Taken together, these results suggest that chronic pain is associated with subtle, spatially distributed alterations of brain structure.
神经影像学是研究慢性疼痛与大脑结构之间潜在关联的有力工具。然而,不同慢性疼痛综合征和异质结果的研究大量涌现,这给数据整合和解释带来了挑战。我们对比较慢性疼痛患者和健康对照的结构性磁共振成像研究进行了预先注册的解剖似然估计荟萃分析。具体来说,我们研究了广泛的大脑结构测量指标,以及灰质和皮质厚度的特定改变。从 8 个数据库中确定了 1990 年 1 月 1 日至 2021 年 4 月 26 日发表的实验的 7849 个摘要,并由 2 名独立评审员进行了评估。总体而言,有 103 项实验共 5075 名参与者符合预先注册的纳入标准。使用黄金标准的全脑错误校正( P < 0.05)校正多重比较后,未发现与慢性疼痛相关的显著差异。然而,使用无阈值聚类增强的探索性分析显示,慢性疼痛患者存在几个空间分布的结构改变簇。大多数簇与涉及疼痛处理的区域重合,包括杏仁核、丘脑、海马体、脑岛、前扣带回和额下回。总的来说,这些结果表明,慢性疼痛与大脑结构的细微、空间分布改变有关。
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