ArticleMolecular pain
Brain Structure and Function of Chronic Low Back Pain Patients on Long-Term Opioid Analgesic Treatment: A Preliminary Study.
Article in Molecular pain. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 15 citations in OpenAlex.
- Beyond pain relief: the effects of chronic opioid use on brain structure and function in diabetic neuropathy-a multimodal neuroimaging study.Diabetologia · 2025Article
- Stress-Related Brain Alterations in Chronic Pain.European journal of pain (London, England) · 2025Article
- Loss of effort in chronic low-back pain patients: Motivational anhedonia in chronic pain.PloS one · 2025Article
- Neuroimaging of opioid effects in humans across conditions of acute administration, chronic pain therapy, and opioid use disorder.Trends in neurosciences · 2024Review
- Mapping Brain Structure Variability in Chronic Pain: The Role of Widespreadness and Pain Type and Its Mediating Relationship With Suicide Attempt.Biological psychiatry · 2024Article
- Disrupted Resting-State Functional Connectivity and Effective Connectivity of the Nucleus Accumbens in Chronic Low Back Pain: A Cross-Sectional Study.Journal of pain research · 2024Article
- Research on the multidimensional brain remodeling mechanisms at the level of brain regions, circuits, and networks in patients with chronic lower back pain caused by lumbar disk herniation.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2024Article
- Brain Circuits Involved in the Development of Chronic Musculoskeletal Pain: Evidence From Non-invasive Brain Stimulation.Frontiers in neurology · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Chronic low back pain (CLBP) is often treated with opioid analgesics (OA), a class of medications associated with a significant risk of misuse. However, little is known about how treatment with OA affect the brain in chronic pain patients. Gaining this knowledge is a necessary first step towards understanding OA associated analgesia and elucidating long-term risk of OA misuse. Here we study CLBP patients chronically medicated with opioids without any evidence of misuse and compare them to CLBP patients not on opioids and to healthy controls using structural and functional brain imaging. CLBP patients medicated with OA showed loss of volume in the nucleus accumbens and thalamus, and an overall significant decrease in signal to noise ratio in their sub-cortical areas. Power spectral density analysis (PSD) of frequency content in the accumbens' resting state activity revealed that both medicated and unmedicated patients showed loss of PSD within the slow-5 frequency band (0.01-0.027 Hz) while only CLBP patients on OA showed additional density loss within the slow-4 frequency band (0.027-0.073 Hz). We conclude that chronic treatment with OA is associated with altered brain structure and function within sensory limbic areas.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.