ArticleeLife2022
Opioid analgesia alters corticospinal coupling along the descending pain system in healthy participants.
Article in eLife, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 30 citations in OpenAlex.
- A review of descending pain modulation in humans.Frontiers in pain research (Lausanne, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Controllability changes pain perception by increasing the precision of expectations.Nature communications · 2025Article
- CoSpine open access simultaneous cortico-spinal fMRI database of thermal pain and motor tasks.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Human microphysiological model of dorsal root ganglion-spinal cord dorsal horn circuitry recapitulates opioid induced effects.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Opioid Regulation of Social Homeostasis: Connecting Loneliness to Addiction.Biological psychiatry · 2025Review
- EPISeg: Automated segmentation of the spinal cord on echo planar images using open-access multi-center data.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Explainable fNIRS-based pain decoding under pharmacological conditions via deep transfer learning approach.Neurophotonics · 2024Article
- A multichannel electrophysiological approach to noninvasively and precisely record human spinal cord activity.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Neuroimaging of opioid effects in humans across conditions of acute administration, chronic pain therapy, and opioid use disorder.Trends in neurosciences · 2024Review
- The Nocebo Effect.Annual review of pharmacology and toxicology · 2024Review
- Cerebro-spinal somatotopic organization uncovered through functional connectivity mapping.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Opioids are potent analgesic drugs with widespread cortical, subcortical, and spinal targets. In particular, the central pain system comprising ascending and descending pain pathways has high opioid receptor densities and is thus crucial for opioid analgesia. Here, we investigated the effects of the opioid remifentanil in a large sample (n = 78) of healthy male participants using combined corticospinal functional MRI. This approach offers the possibility to measure BOLD responses simultaneously in the brain and spinal cord, allowing us to investigate the role of corticospinal coupling in opioid analgesia. Our data show that opioids altered activity in regions involved in pain processing such as somatosensory regions, including the spinal cord and pain modulation such as prefrontal regions. Moreover, coupling strength along the descending pain system, that is, between the anterior cingulate cortex, periaqueductal gray, and spinal cord, was stronger in participants who reported stronger analgesia during opioid treatment while participants that received saline showed reduced coupling when experiencing less pain. These results indicate that coupling along the descending pain pathway is a potential mechanism of opioid analgesia and can differentiate between opioid analgesia and unspecific reductions in pain such as habituation.
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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.