A new study has found that higher pain intensity is associated with a decrease in working memory capacity and increased activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
The results of the study were published in the journal ‘Neuropsychologia’.
Preliminary research has suggested that pain-related deficits in working memory depend on a person’s level of emotional distress. Yet the specific brain and psychological factors that underlie emotional distress in contributing to this relationship are not well understood.
However, this study suggested that healthy people in pain also exhibit deficits in working memory or mental process of holding and manipulating information over a short period of time.
The study titled ‘Modeling cloud factors and self-expression of affective distress in the association between pain and working memory in healthy individuals’, attempted to address this gap in the literature.
The study was written by University of Miami psychology in recent Ph.D. graduate students Steven Anderson, Joanna Witkin, and Taylor Bolt and consultants Elizabeth Losin, director of the Social and Cultural Neuroscience laboratory at the University of Miami; Maria Llabre, associate professor and chair of the Department of Psychology; and Claire Ashton-James, senior lecturer at the University of Sydney.
The study used publicly available brain imaging and self-report data from the Human Connectome Project (HCP), a major project supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that aims to build a map of the structural and functional links complete in a healthy human brain.
Brain analysis and self-report data from 416 HCP participants were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM), a statistical method for shaping complex relationships between multiple variables.
In the 228 participants who reported experiencing some degree of pain in the seven days prior to the study, the authors found that higher pain intensity was directly related to worse performance of a test used to common of working memory, the background work. In the n-back activity, participants are shown a series of letters and asked if the letter they are seeing appeared on some previous screens. The more screens back in the series participants are asked to remember, the more working memory is required.
In addition, the authors found that higher pain intensity was indirectly linked to worsening working memory performance through increased activity in a specific area in the center of the frontal cortex during the n-back operation, the cortex. prefrontal ventromedial (vmPFC). The vmPFC is a brain region involved in pain, affective distress, and psychosis. Interestingly, the relationship between daily pain and vmPFC brain activity in this study is similar to previous findings in patients with chronic pain.
“We found that healthy participants with even low levels of pain reported in the vmPFC during their back work had different activity levels compared to healthy participants who did not report pain. Surprisingly, this pattern of activity was more similar to patients with chronic pain than healthy patients exposed to laboratory pain management, ”Witkin said.
In contrast, the authors found that some areas of emotional distress reported by participants, such as anger, fear, and perceived stress, were not related to working memory performance.
“Studies looking at the link between pain and psychiatry have typically focused on patients with chronic pain or research participants who have experienced test-induced pain,” Anderson said.
“Even though pain is a common experience for many people, little is known about how everyday experience of pain affects psychology,” Anderson said.
Using the publicly available HCP data allowed the researchers to import data from a much larger group of participants than is usual in brain imaging studies due to the high cost of brain scans. .
This large sample allowed the authors to use structural equation modeling, a statistical method that allows to understand complex relationships between multiple variables which in this case may help to explain how pain reduces working memory. The authors note that their findings have an impact in both clinical and non-clinical settings.
“This study highlights the real impact that pain can have on our ability to think even in healthy people, and identifies how this can happen in the brain,” Losin said.
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This story was published from a wire group group with no text changes.
