ArticlePloS one2013
Dopamine and pain sensitivity: neither sulpiride nor acute phenylalanine and tyrosine depletion have effects on thermal pain sensations in healthy volunteers.
Article in PloS one, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed, 33 citations in OpenAlex.
- Dopamine has no direct causal role in the formation of treatment expectations and placebo analgesia in humans.PLoS biology · 2024Trial
- The effect of dopamine on conditioned placebo analgesia in healthy individuals: a double-blind randomized trial.Psychopharmacology · 2018Trial
- Trial
- The Role of Expectations and Endogenous Opioids in Mindfulness-Based Relief of Experimentally Induced Acute Pain.Psychosomatic medicineTrial
- Reproducible Generalized Thermal Sensation Triggered by Levodopa in a Patient With Parkinson's Disease.Journal of medical cases · 2026Article
- Differential Operant Conditioning of Emotional-Motivational and Sensory-Discriminative Pain Responses.European journal of pain (London, England) · 2026Article
- Exploring Nepicastat Activity: Beyond DβH.International journal of molecular sciences · 2025Article
- Activation of Pedunculopontine Tegmental Nucleus Alleviates the Pain Induced by the Lesion of Midbrain Dopaminergic Neurons.International journal of molecular sciences · 2024Article
- Recent advances in pain management based on nanoparticle technologies.Journal of nanobiotechnology · 2022Review
- Altered Pain Processing Associated with Administration of Dopamine Agonist and Antagonist in Healthy Volunteers.Brain sciences · 2022Article
- Research Progress on the Pharmacological Action of Schisantherin A.Evidence-based complementary and alternative medicine : eCAM · 2022Review
- Cutaneous pigmentation modulates skin sensitivity via tyrosinase-dependent dopaminergic signalling.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- Subjective utility moderates bidirectional effects of conflicting motivations on pain perception.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- Methylphenidate attenuates the response to cold pain but not to aversive auditory stimuli in healthy human: a double-blind randomized controlled study.Pain reports · 2017Article
- Neural Habituation to Painful Stimuli Is Modulated by Dopamine: Evidence from a Pharmacological fMRI Study.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2017Article
- Chronic Back Pain Is Associated with Alterations in Dopamine Neurotransmission in the Ventral Striatum.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2015Article
- Spinal dopaminergic projections control the transition to pathological pain plasticity via a D1/D5-mediated mechanism.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2015Article
- Effects of the Fourth Ventricle Compression in the Regulation of the Autonomic Nervous System: A Randomized Control Trial.Evidence-based complementary and alternative medicine : eCAM · 2015Article
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Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Based on animal studies and some indirect clinical evidence, dopamine has been suggested to have anti-nociceptive effects. Here, we investigated directly the effects of increased and decreased availability of extracellular dopamine on pain perception in healthy volunteers. In Study 1, participants ingested, in separate sessions, a placebo and a low dose of the centrally acting D2-receptor antagonist sulpiride, intended to increase synaptic dopamine via predominant pre-synaptic blockade. No effects were seen on thermal pain thresholds, tolerance, or temporal summation. Study 2 used the acute phenylalanine and tyrosine depletion (APTD) method to transiently decrease dopamine availability. In one session participants ingested a mixture that depletes the dopamine amino acid precursors, phenylalanine and tyrosine. In the other session they ingested a nutritionally balanced control mixture. APTD led to a small mood-lowering response following aversive thermal stimulation, but had no effects on the perception of cold, warm, or pain stimuli. In both studies the experimental manipulation of dopaminergic neurotransmission was successful as indicated by manipulation checks. The results contradict proposals that dopamine has direct anti-nociceptive effects in acute experimental pain. Based on dopamine's well-known role in reward processing, we hypothesize that also in the context of pain, dopamine acts on stimulus salience and might play a role in the initiation of avoidance behavior rather than having direct antinociceptive effects in acute experimental pain.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.