PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Anna Xu
AU  - Bart Larsen
AU  - Erica B. Baller
AU  - J. Cobb Scott
AU  - Vaishnavi Sharma
AU  - Azeez Adebimpe
AU  - Allan I. Basbaum
AU  - Robert H. Dworkin
AU  - Robert R. Edwards
AU  - Clifford J. Woolf
AU  - Simon B. Eickhoff
AU  - Claudia R. Eickhoff
AU  - Theodore D. Satterthwaite
TI  - Convergent neural representations of acute nociceptive pain in healthy volunteers: A large-scale fMRI meta-analysis
AID  - 10.1101/779280
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 779280
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/09/27/779280.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/09/27/779280.full
AB  - Characterizing a reliable, pain-related neural signature is critical for translational applications. Many prior fMRI studies have examined acute pain-related brain activation in healthy participants. However, synthesizing these data to identify convergent patterns of activation can be challenging due to the heterogeneity of experimental designs and samples. To address this challenge, we conducted a comprehensive meta-analysis of fMRI studies of stimulus-induced pain in healthy participants. Following pre-registration, two independent reviewers evaluated 4,927 abstracts returned from a search of 8 databases, with 222 fMRI experiments meeting inclusion criteria. We analyzed these experiments using Activation Likelihood Estimation with rigorous type I error control (voxel height p < 0.001, cluster p < 0.05 FWE-corrected) and found a convergent, largely bilateral pattern of pain-related activation in the secondary somatosensory cortex, insula, midcingulate cortex, and thalamus. Notably, these regions were consistently recruited regardless of stimulation technique, location of induction, and participant sex. These findings suggest a highly-conserved core set of pain-related brain areas, encouraging applications as a biomarker for novel therapeutics targeting acute pain.HIGHLIGHTSPain stimulation recruits a core set of pain-related brain regions.This core set includes thalamus, SII, insula and mid-cingulate cortex.These regions were recruited regardless of stimulus modality and stimulus location.