ArticleeLife2022
Simultaneous brain, brainstem, and spinal cord pharmacological-fMRI reveals involvement of an endogenous opioid network in attentional analgesia.
Article in eLife, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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The trial behind it
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Who cites it
39 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 54 citations in OpenAlex.
- Endogenous mu-opioid modulation of social connection in humans: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Translational psychiatry · 2024Pooled it
- The role of endogenous opioids in mindfulness and sham mindfulness-meditation for the direct alleviation of evoked chronic low back pain: a randomized clinical trial.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2024Trial
- Mechanisms of Acupuncture on the Neurovascular Unit in Migraine: A Narrative Review.European journal of neurology · 2026Review
- Evaluating Approaches for Inference Testing of Whole-Brain Densely Sampled Single-Subject Task fMRI Data.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Mapping whole-brain auditory activation with 3T multi-echo fMRI at the group and individual-subject level.Hearing research · 2026Article
- Placebo effect on brainstem activity associated with capsaicin-evoked urge to cough in healthy humans.The European respiratory journal · 2026Article
- Multi-timescale Rhythmic Dynamics in Rostral Ventromedial Medulla Neurons.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- A corticospinal signature for interindividual pain sensitivity.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Mapping Whole-Brain Auditory Activation with 3T Multi-Echo fMRI at the Group and Individual-Subject Level.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Simultaneous zero echo time fMRI of rat brain and spinal cord.Magnetic resonance in medicine · 2025Article
- Controllability changes pain perception by increasing the precision of expectations.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Electrical Spinal Imaging: A noninvasive, high-resolution approach that enables electrophysiological mapping of the human spinal cord.PLoS biology · 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
- Opioid Regulation of Social Homeostasis: Connecting Loneliness to Addiction.Biological psychiatry · 2025Review
- Simultaneous zero echo time fMRI of rat brain and spinal cord.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Diffuse Noxious Inhibitory Controls in Chronic Pain States: Insights from Pre-Clinical Studies.International journal of molecular sciences · 2025Review
- Distinguishing the activity of adjacent somatosensory nuclei within the brainstem using 3T fMRI.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Review
- A multichannel electrophysiological approach to noninvasively and precisely record human spinal cord activity.PLoS biology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Pain perception is decreased by shifting attentional focus away from a threatening event. This attentional analgesia engages parallel descending control pathways from anterior cingulate (ACC) to locus coeruleus, and ACC to periaqueductal grey (PAG) - rostral ventromedial medulla (RVM), indicating possible roles for noradrenergic or opioidergic neuromodulators. To determine which pathway modulates nociceptive activity in humans, we used simultaneous whole brain-spinal cord pharmacological-fMRI (N = 39) across three sessions. Noxious thermal forearm stimulation generated somatotopic-activation of dorsal horn (DH) whose activity correlated with pain report and mirrored attentional pain modulation. Activity in an adjacent cluster reported the interaction between task and noxious stimulus. Effective connectivity analysis revealed that ACC interacts with PAG and RVM to modulate spinal cord activity. Blocking endogenous opioids with Naltrexone impairs attentional analgesia and disrupts RVM-spinal and ACC-PAG connectivity. Noradrenergic augmentation with Reboxetine did not alter attentional analgesia. Cognitive pain modulation involves opioidergic ACC-PAG-RVM descending control which suppresses spinal nociceptive activity.
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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.