KMID : 0605720120180010025
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Journal of the Korean Society of Biological Therapies in Psychiatry 2012 Volume.18 No. 1 p.25 ~ p.34
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Role of Cerebral Cortex on Pain Processing : From the Evidence of Functional Imaging Studies
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Kwak Kyung-Hwa
Lee Seung-Jae
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Abstract
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Functional imaging techniques have allowed researchers to look within the brain, and revealed the cortical representation of pain. Initial experiments, performed in the early 1990s, revolutionized pain research, as they demonstrated that pain was not processed in a single cortical area, but in several distributed brain regions. To date, neuroscientific research on pain processing points out a distinction between the sensory-discriminative and the affective-motivational domains. The former domain engages stimulus localization and intensity and is assessed with ratings of intensity while the latter one involves the affective component of pain and is measured with ratings of unpleasantness. This duality is also framed in terms of medial and lateral pain system based on thalamic afferents. These two dimensions of pain processing are underpinned by discrete yet interacting neural networks. In this brief article, we reviewed the imaging literature to date that has allowed these advances to be made, and aimed to take these new insights into the clinic, to investigate and provide new remedies for chronic pain sufferers.
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KEYWORD
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Pain processing, Central mechanism, fMRI, Pain modulation, Empathy for pain
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