Northwestern Events Calendar

Oct
5
2018

"A Cortical Gain Control Mechanism for Pain"

When: Friday, October 5, 2018
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM CT

Where: Ward Building, 5-230, 303 E. Chicago Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611 map it

Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students

Contact: Donna Daviston   (312) 503-1687

Group: Department of Neuroscience Seminars

Category: Lectures & Meetings

Description:

The department of Physiology welcomes Jing Wang, M.D., Ph.D.

The experience of pain is strongly shaped by emotional and cognitive processes, and yet cortical mechanisms for pain are poorly understood. We recently found that in rodents, persistent pain can induce a generalized, anatomically nonspecific increase in the aversive response to a noxious stimulus, similar to what patients of fibromyalgia or other chronic pain experience. Using a combination of optogenetics, in vivo electrophysiology and neuro-computation, we have identified a new cortical mechanism for this enhanced aversion. We found that the nociceptive response of a neuron in the PFC or anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is linked to its baseline firing rates through a linear gain control mechanism. Chronic or persistent pain enhances the basal firing rates, which in turn provides an enhanced gain factor in the nociceptive response in ACC neurons. Conversely, chronic pain reduces the gain of PFC neurons. Hence, cortical neurons possess an internal gain for the regulation of pain, and depending on the location and identity of these neurons, this gain control system can either magnify or diminish the pain experience. We have successfully applied this mechanism to neuromodulation, where we showed that a small stimulatory effect on the PFC, when temporally coupled with the time course of noxious stimulation, can have a dramatic effect on pain regulation. This gain control concept could provide a working mechanism for neuromodulatory techniques such as transcranial current stimulation.

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