ArticleBiological psychiatry2024
Mapping Brain Structure Variability in Chronic Pain: The Role of Widespreadness and Pain Type and Its Mediating Relationship With Suicide Attempt.
Article in Biological psychiatry, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 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
19 citing papers in PubMed, 23 citations in OpenAlex.
- Altered cortical morphology and structural covariance network in chronic neck and shoulder pain.Neuroradiology · 2026Article
- Brain imaging-wide exploration of site-specific pain: genetic correlation and Mendelian randomization study.Psychological medicine · 2026Article
- Article
- Investigating genetic overlap of multidimensional pain and suicidal behaviors in >2 million individuals.Research square · 2026Article
- Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex hemispheric asymmetry and chronic low back pain at 8-year follow-up in community-dwelling older adults.GeroScience · 2026Article
- Genetic risk of chronic pain conditions associated with risk of suicide death through an integrative analysis of EHR and genomics data.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- The Impact of Brain Morphometry on Low Back Pain Risk: A Mendelian Randomization Study.Journal of pain research · 2026Article
- Timing of depressive episode onset relative to chronic pain reveals distinct patterns of affective and multisite pain.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- Decoding chronic pain: integrating genetics, neuroimaging, and AI for precision management.Frontiers in pain research (Lausanne, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Multi-omics analysis reveal clinical-gut-brain interactions in female ibs patients with adverse childhood experiences.Biology of sex differences · 2025Article
- Association between anxiety disorder, anxiolytic drugs, and risk of incident Parkinson's disease.NPJ Parkinson's disease · 2025Article
- Sex-specific genetics underlie increased chronic pain risk in women: genome-wide association studies from the UK Biobank.British journal of anaesthesia · 2025Article
- Biological markers and psychosocial factors predict chronic pain conditions.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Chronic pain is associated with greater brain entropy in the prefrontal cortex.The journal of pain · 2025Article
- Gene discovery and pleiotropic architecture of chronic pain in a genome-wide association study of >1.2 million individuals.Research square · 2025Article
- The inflammatory and genetic mechanisms underlying the cumulative effect of co-occurring pain conditions on depression.Science advances · 2025Article
- Gene discovery and pleiotropic architecture of Chronic Pain in a Genome-wide Association Study of >1.2 million Individuals.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Decoding chronic pain: the glutamate-GABA tug of war in the cerebral cortex.Frontiers in molecular neuroscience · 2025Review
- A New Look at Gray Matter Decreases in Chronic Pain.Biological psychiatry · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundChronic pain affects nearly 20% of the U.S. POPULATION: It is a leading cause of disability globally and is associated with a heightened risk for suicide. The role of the central nervous system in the perception and maintenance of chronic pain has recently been accepted, but specific brain circuitries involved have yet to be mapped across pain types in a large-scale study.
methodsWe used data from the UK Biobank (N = 21,968) to investigate brain structural alterations in individuals reporting chronic pain compared with pain-free control participants and their mediating effect on history of suicide attempt.
resultsChronic pain and, more notably, chronic multisite pain was associated with, on average, lower surface area throughout the cortex after adjusting for demographic, clinical, and neuropsychiatric confounds. Only participants with abdominal pain showed lower subcortical volumes, including the amygdala and brainstem, and lower cerebellum volumes. Participants with chronic headaches showed a widespread thicker cortex compared with control participants. Mediation analyses revealed that precuneus thickness mediated the relationship of chronic multisite pain and history of suicide attempt. Mediating effects were also identified specific to localized pain, with the strongest effect being amygdala volume in individuals with chronic abdominal pain.
conclusionsResults support a widespread effect of chronic pain on brain structure and distinct brain structures underlying chronic musculoskeletal pain, visceral pain, and headaches. Mediation effects of regions in the extended ventromedial prefrontal cortex subsystem suggest that exacerbated negative internal states, negative self-referencing, and impairments in future planning may underlie suicidal behaviors in individuals with chronic pain.
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.