Harish A. Sharma1, Raj Gupta2,
William Olivero3
1Beckman Institute, University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, United States; 2University
of Illinois College of Medicine; 3Neurosurgery, Carle Foundation
Hospital
Using
fMRI to study pain has revealed new information about how the brain responds
to painful stimuli and what regions of the brain are activated during pain.
Unfortunately, many of the paradigms that are used in fMRI studies either
fail to replicate the subjects pain or painful stimuli is used in volunteers
without pain. Moreover, longitudinal fMRI studies that follow patients who
develop chronic pain from the acute phase of pain have not been performed.We
developed an fMRI paradigm that reliably mimics a clinical pain syndrome in
patients who have low back pain and leg pain from acute lumbar radiculopathy
and lumbar degenerative disc disease.