Indoor or Outdoor? Generalization of Costly Pain-Related Avoidance Behavior to Conceptually Related Contexts.

When pain persists beyond healing time and becomes a "false alarm" of bodily threat, protective strategies, such as avoidance, are no longer adaptive. More specifically, generalization of avoidance based on conceptual knowledge may contribute to chronic pain disability. Using an operant robotic-arm avoidance paradigm, healthy participants (N = 50), could perform more effortful movements in the threat context (eg, pictures of outdoor scenes) to avoid painful stimuli, whereas no pain occured in the safe context (eg, pictures of indoor scenes).

Will that hurt? A contingency learning task to assess pain-expectancy judgments for low back postures.

Background And Objectives: Contingency learning, i.e. learning that a cue predicts the presence (or absence) of an event, is central to the formation of beliefs regarding painfulness of body postures.

The Perceived Opportunity to Avoid Pain Paradoxically Increases Pain-Related Fear Through Increased Threat Appraisals.

Background: Although pain-related avoidance is mainly intended to reduce the accompanying anticipatory fear, avoidance behavior may paradoxically increase fear when a previous avoidance response is no longer available, suggesting that there is a bidirectional relationship between pain-related fear and avoidance.

Purpose: We hypothesized that avoidance can serve as a source of information that fuels irrational pain-related threat appraisals, which, in turn, increases pain-related fear.

Methods: Participants (N = 66) were exposed to a painful heat stimulus and randomly assigned to the avoidance or control group.

Do the risks of Lynch syndrome-related cancers depend on the parent of origin of the mutation?

Individuals who carry pathogenic mutations in DNA mismatch repair (MMR) genes have high risks of cancer, and small studies have suggested that these risks depend on the sex of the parent from whom the mutation was inherited. We have conducted the first large study of such a parent-of-origin effect (POE). Our study was based on all MMR gene mutation carriers and their relatives in the Colon Cancer Family Registry, comprising 18,226 people.

Generalization and Extinction of Concept-BasedPain-Related Fear.

In chronic pain, pain-related fear seems to overgeneralize to safe stimuli, thus contributing to excessive fear and avoidance behavior. Evidence shows that pain-related fear can be acquired and generalized based on conceptual knowledge. Using a fear conditioning paradigm, we investigated whether this concept-based pain-related fear could also be extinguished.

The Opportunity to Avoid Pain May Paradoxically Increase Fear.

Unlabelled: Fear-avoidance models propose that pain-related fear may spur avoidance behavior leading to chronic pain disability. Pain-related fear elicits avoidance behavior, which is typically aimed at reducing fear. We hypothesized that engaging in avoidance may (paradoxically) increase rather than decrease pain-related fear (ie, bidirectionality hypothesis).

Domain-general and domain-specific neural changes underlying visual expertise.

Visual expertise induces changes in neural processing for many different domains of expertise. However, it is unclear how expertise effects for different domains of expertise are related. In the present fMRI study, we combine large-scale univariate and multi-voxel analyses to contrast the expertise-related neural changes associated with two different domains of expertise, bird expertise (ornithology) and mineral expertise (mineralogy).

Dependence of colorectal cancer risk on the parent-of-origin of mutations in DNA mismatch repair genes.

Genetic diseases associated with dynamic mutations in microsatellite DNA often display parent-of-origin effects (POEs) in which the risk of disease depends on the sex of the parent from whom the disease allele was inherited. Carriers of germline mutations in mismatch repair (MMR) genes have high risks of colorectal carcinoma (CRC). We investigated whether these risks depend on the parent-of-origin of the mutation.

Is uptake of genetic testing for colorectal cancer influenced by knowledge of insurance implications?

Objective: To assess whether knowledge of insurance implications influenced uptake of genetic testing by participants in a research study of the causes of colorectal cancer.

Design, Setting And Participants: Analysis of uptake of genetic testing by participants in the population-based Victorian Colorectal Cancer Family Study during two periods: from 1999 to 2003, when participants were not informed of any potential effect of genetic testing conducted during the study on their eligibility for new insurance policies; and from 2003 to 2006, when the protocol was changed to provide participants with information on the potential effect of genetic testing on insurance eligibility.

Main Outcome Measure: Uptake of genetic testing for germline mutations in DNA mismatch repair (MMR) genes at a family cancer clinic.

Cancer risks for mismatch repair gene mutation carriers: a population-based early onset case-family study.

Background & Aims: Cancer risks for mismatch repair gene mutation carriers have been derived almost exclusively using families ascertained owing to their strong cancer family history. These may be overestimates, due to analytic problems, and not generalizable. We estimated average cancer risks for mutations identified in population-based early onset colorectal cancer cases (probands) unselected for family history.