Goldway Noam, Petro Nathan M, Ablin Jacob, Keil Andreas, Ben Simon Eti, Zamir Yoav, Weizman Libat, Greental Ayam, Hendler Talma, Sharon Haggai
Sagol Brain Institute, Wohl Institute for Advanced Imaging, Tel-Aviv Sourasky Medical Centre, Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel.
Sagol School of Neuroscience, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel.
Front Behav Neurosci. 2022 May 4;16:852133. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2022.852133. eCollection 2022.
Chronic pain disorders are often associated with cognitive-emotional dysregulation. However, the relations between such dysregulation, underlying brain processes, and clinical symptom constellations, remain unclear. Here, we aimed to characterize the abnormalities in cognitive-emotional processing involved in fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS) and their relation to disease severity.
Fifty-eight participants, 39 FMS patients (35F), and 19 healthy control subjects (16F) performed an EEG-based paradigm assessing attention allocation by extracting steady-state visually evoked potentials (ssVEP) in response to affective distractors presented during a cognitive task. Patients were also evaluated for pain severity, sleep quality, depression, and anxiety.
EEG ssVEP measurement indicated that, compared to healthy controls, FMS patients displayed impaired affective discrimination, and sustained attention to negative distractors. Moreover, patients displayed decreased task-related fronto-occipital EEG connectivity. Lack of adaptive attentional discrimination, measured via EEG, was predictive of pain severity, while impairments in fronto-occipital connectivity were predictive of impaired sleep.
FMS patients display maladaptive affective attention modulation, which predicts disease symptoms. These findings support the centrality of cognitive-emotional dysregulation in the pathophysiology of chronic pain.
慢性疼痛障碍常与认知-情绪失调相关。然而，这种失调、潜在的脑过程与临床症状群之间的关系仍不清楚。在此，我们旨在描述纤维肌痛综合征（FMS）中涉及的认知-情绪加工异常及其与疾病严重程度的关系。
58名参与者，39名FMS患者（35名女性）和19名健康对照者（16名女性）进行了一项基于脑电图的范式，通过提取稳态视觉诱发电位（ssVEP）来评估在认知任务期间呈现的情感干扰物时的注意力分配。还对患者的疼痛严重程度、睡眠质量、抑郁和焦虑进行了评估。
脑电图ssVEP测量表明，与健康对照者相比，FMS患者表现出情感辨别受损，并且持续关注负面干扰物。此外，患者表现出与任务相关的额枕脑电图连接减少。通过脑电图测量的缺乏适应性注意力辨别可预测疼痛严重程度，而额枕连接受损可预测睡眠受损。
FMS患者表现出适应不良的情感注意力调节，这可预测疾病症状。这些发现支持了认知-情绪失调在慢性疼痛病理生理学中的核心地位。
