the human operculo-insular cortex is pain-preferentially but not pain-exclusively activated by trigeminal and olfactory stimuli人类operculo-insular皮层pain-preferentially但不是pain-exclusively三叉和嗅觉刺激激活.pdfVIP

The Human Operculo-Insular Cortex Is Pain-Preferentially but Not Pain-Exclusively Activated by Trigeminal and Olfactory Stimuli ¨ ¨ 1 1 1 ¨ 2 2 1 Jorn Lotsch *, Carmen Walter , Lisa Felden , Ulrike Noth , Ralf Deichmann , Bruno G. Oertel 1 pharmazentrum frankfurt/ZAFES, Institute of Clinical Pharmacology, Goethe - University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 2 Brain Imaging Center, Goethe - University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany Abstract Increasing evidence about the central nervous representation of pain in the brain suggests that the operculo-insular cortex is a crucial part of the pain matrix. The pain-specificity of a brain region may be tested by administering nociceptive stimuli while controlling for unspecific activations by administering non-nociceptive stimuli. We applied this paradigm to nasal chemosensation, delivering trigeminal or olfactory stimuli, to verify the pain-specificity of the operculo-insular cortex. In detail, brain activations due to intranasal stimulation induced by non-nociceptive olfactory stimuli of hydrogen sulfide (5 ppm) or vanillin (0.8 ppm) were used to mask brain activations due to somatosensory, clearly nociceptive trigeminal stimulations with gaseous carbon dioxide (75% v/v). Functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) images were recorded from 12 healthy volunteers in a 3T head scanner during stimulus administration using an event-related design. We found that significantly more activations following nociceptive than non-nociceptive stimuli were localized bilaterally in two restricted clusters in the brain containing the primary and secondary somatosensory areas and the insular cortices consistent with the operculo-insular cort