ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2015
Spinal cord-midbrain functional connectivity is related to perceived pain intensity: a combined spino-cortical FMRI study.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 49 papers.
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Who cites it
49 citing papers in PubMed, 96 citations in OpenAlex.
- Perception of first and second pain during offset analgesia.Experimental brain research · 2025Trial
- Correlation of Pain Reduction with fMRI BOLD Response in Osteoarthritis Patients Treated with Paracetamol: Randomized, Double-Blind, Crossover Clinical Efficacy Study.Pain medicine (Malden, Mass.) · 2018Trial
- A predictive corticospinal model for pain perception.Cell reports. Medicine · 2026Article
- Functional magnetic resonance imaging insights into nociceptive signal processing network in rat lumbar spinal cord.Pain reports · 2026Article
- Simultaneous zero echo time fMRI of rat brain and spinal cord.Magnetic resonance in medicine · 2025Article
- CoSpine open access simultaneous cortico-spinal fMRI database of thermal pain and motor tasks.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Differential encoding of noxious heat and self-reported pain along corticospinal networks: a simultaneous spinal cord-brain fMRI study.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Comparing neural responses to cutaneous heat and pressure pain in healthy participants.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Simultaneous zero echo time fMRI of rat brain and spinal cord.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Exploratory study on the ascending pain pathway in patients with chronic neck and shoulder pain based on combined brain and spinal cord diffusion tensor imaging.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2025Article
- Review
- Radiation of pain: Psychophysical evidence for a population coding mechanism in humans.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Thermal stimulus task fMRI in the cervical spinal cord at 7 Tesla.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
- Recent developments and future avenues for human corticospinal neuroimaging.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2024Review
- Cerebro-spinal somatotopic organization uncovered through functional connectivity mapping.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Reliability of task-based fMRI in the dorsal horn of the human spinal cord.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Spinal Cord fMRI: A New Window into the Central Nervous System.The Neuroscientist : a review journal bringing neurobiology, neurology and psychiatry · 2023Review
- Longitudinal multiparametric MRI of traumatic spinal cord injury in animal models.Magnetic resonance imaging · 2023Review
- The neurovascular unit in healthy and injured spinal cord.Journal of cerebral blood flow and metabolism : official journal of the International Society of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism · 2023Review
- Distraction and cognitive control independently impact parietal and prefrontal response to pain.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The dynamic interaction between ascending spinocortical nociceptive signaling and the descending control of the dorsal horn (DH) by brain regions such as the periaqueductal gray matter (PAG) plays a critical role in acute and chronic pain. To noninvasively investigate the processing of nociceptive stimuli in humans, previous fMRI studies either focused exclusively on the brain or, more recently, on the spinal cord. However, to relate neuronal responses in the brain to responses in the spinal cord and to assess the functional interplay between both sites in normal and aberrant conditions, fMRI of both regions within one experiment is necessary. Employing a new MRI acquisition protocol with two separate slice stacks, individually adapted resolutions and parameter settings that are dynamically updated to the optimized settings for the respective region we assessed neuronal activity in the spinal cord and in the brain within one measurement at 3 T. Using a parametric pain paradigm with thermal stimulation to the left radial forearm, we observed BOLD responses in the ipsilateral DH of the spinal segment C6 and corresponding neuronal responses in typical pain-processing brain regions. Based on correlations of adjusted time series, we are able to reveal functional connectivity between the spinal C6-DH and the thalamus, primary somatosensory cortex, bilateral insula, bilateral striatum, and key structures of the descending pain-modulatory system such as the PAG, the hypothalamus, and the amygdala. Importantly, the individual strength of the spinal-PAG coupling predicted individual pain ratings highlighting the functional relevance of this system during physiological pain signaling.
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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.