ArticlePain2025
Differential maturation of the brain networks required for the sensory, emotional, and cognitive aspects of pain in human newborns.
Article in Pain, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
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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.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Lower resting-state functional connectivity between frontoparietal and sensory networks is associated with recent pain intensity in a community sample of youth.Neuroimage. Reports · 2026Article
- Fetal Pain Perception:Annals of the Child Neurology Society · 2026Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
abstractPain is multidimensional, including sensory-discriminative, affective-motivational, and cognitive-evaluative components. Although the concept of pain is learned through life, it is not known when and how the brain networks that are required to encode these different dimensions of pain develop. Using the 2 largest available databases of brain magnetic resonance images-the developing Human Connectome Project and the Human Connectome Project-we have mapped the development of the pain connectome-the neural network required for pain perception-in infants from 26 to 42 weeks of postmenstrual age (PMA, n = 372), compared with adults (n = 98). Partial correlation analysis of resting BOLD signal between pairwise combinations of 12 pain-related brain regions showed that overall functional connectivity is significantly weaker before 32 weeks PMA compared with adults. However, over the following weeks, significantly different developmental trajectories emerge across pain connectome subnetworks. The first subnetwork to reach adult levels in strength and proportion of connections is the sensory-discriminative subnetwork (34-36 weeks PMA), followed by the affective-motivational subnetwork (36-38 weeks PMA), while the cognitive-evaluative subnetwork has still not reached adult levels at term. This study reveals a previously unknown pattern of early development of the infrastructure necessary to encode different components of pain experience. Newborn neural pathways required for mature pain processing in the brain are incomplete in newborns compared with adults, particularly regarding the emotional and evaluative aspects of pain. The rapid age-related changes suggest that pain processing, and consequently pain experience, changes rapidly over this developmental period and unlikely to be the same as in adults, even at term.
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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.