ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2012
Baseline reward circuitry activity and trait reward responsiveness predict expression of opioid analgesia in healthy subjects.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 52 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
52 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
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- Dynamic coupling of emotion and pain: from perception to affective response.The Korean journal of pain · 2026Review
- Mesocorticolimbic circuitry in episodic migraine: reward- and punishment-related responses and resting-state connectivity.The journal of headache and pain · 2026Article
- Nonpharmacological and pharmacological influences on opioid effects: A review of clinical research findings.The Journal of pharmacology and experimental therapeutics · 2025Review
- Explainable fNIRS-based pain decoding under pharmacological conditions via deep transfer learning approach.Neurophotonics · 2024Article
- Neuroimaging of opioid effects in humans across conditions of acute administration, chronic pain therapy, and opioid use disorder.Trends in neurosciences · 2024Review
- Deciphering nociplastic pain: clinical features, risk factors and potential mechanisms.Nature reviews. Neurology · 2024Review
- Assessing Risk Factors and Comorbidities in the Treatment of Chronic Pain: A Narrative Review.Current pain and headache reports · 2024Review
- Chronic pain, chronic stress and substance use: overlapping mechanisms and implications.Frontiers in pain research (Lausanne, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- Opioid analgesia alters corticospinal coupling along the descending pain system in healthy participants.eLife · 2022Article
- Multidimensional Pain Modulation by Acupuncture Analgesia: The Reward Effect of Acupuncture on Pain Relief.Evidence-based complementary and alternative medicine : eCAM · 2022Review
- Brain Imaging Biomarkers for Chronic Pain.Frontiers in neurology · 2021Review
- Endogenous opioid peptides in the descending pain modulatory circuit.Neuropharmacology · 2020Review
- Striatal hypofunction as a neural correlate of mood alterations in chronic pain patients.NeuroImage · 2020Article
- Between placebo and nocebo: Response to control treatment is mediated by amygdala activity and connectivity.European journal of pain (London, England) · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Variability in opioid analgesia has been attributed to many factors. For example, genetic variability of the μ-opioid receptor (MOR)-encoding gene introduces variability in MOR function and endogenous opioid neurotransmission. Emerging evidence suggests that personality trait related to the experience of reward is linked to endogenous opioid neurotransmission. We hypothesized that opioid-induced behavioral analgesia would be predicted by the trait reward responsiveness (RWR) and the response of the brain reward circuitry to noxious stimuli at baseline before opioid administration. In healthy volunteers using functional magnetic resonance imaging and the μ-opioid agonist remifentanil, we found that the magnitude of behavioral opioid analgesia is positively correlated with the trait RWR and predicted by the neuronal response to painful noxious stimuli before infusion in key structures of the reward circuitry, such as the orbitofrontal cortex, nucleus accumbens, and the ventral tegmental area. These findings highlight the role of the brain reward circuitry in the expression of behavioral opioid analgesia. We also show a positive correlation between behavioral opioid analgesia and opioid-induced suppression of neuronal responses to noxious stimuli in key structures of the descending pain modulatory system (amygdala, periaqueductal gray, and rostral-ventromedial medulla), as well as the hippocampus. Further, these activity changes were predicted by the preinfusion period neuronal response to noxious stimuli within the ventral tegmentum. These results support the notion of future imaging-based subject-stratification paradigms that can guide therapeutic decisions.
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