Verbal Support From a Stranger Reduces the Development of Mechanical Hypersensitivity: Behavioral and Neurophysiological Evidence.

Hand-holding reduces experimentally induced acute pain and buffers against the development of mechanical secondary hypersensitivity, an indirect proxy of central sensitization. Here, we tested if verbal support from a stranger, a common occurrence in clinical contexts, exerts the same effects. In this preregistered study, 44 healthy female participants were assigned to an alone or support group whereby a supportive female stranger encouraged them through the painful procedure leading to secondary mechanical hypersensitivity.

City-scale model for COVID-19 epidemiology with mobility and social activities represented by a set of hidden Markov models.

Background And Objective: SARS-CoV-2 emerged by the end of 2019 and became a global pandemic due to its rapid spread. Various outbreaks of the disease in different parts of the world have been studied, and epidemiological analyses of these outbreaks have been useful for developing models with the aim of tracking and predicting the spread of epidemics. In this paper, an agent-based model that predicts the local daily evolution of the number of people hospitalized in intensive care due to COVID-19 is presented.

Pressure pain threshold mappings of the infraspinatus muscle in chronic unilateral shoulder pain patients do not reflect generalized hypersensitivity.

Objectives: Increased mechanical sensitivity has been observed on the unaffected side in chronic pain conditions, suggesting generalized or widespread hypersensitivity. However, this cannot be considered as a universal response since this hypersensitivity is inconsistent across muscle pain pathologies. The aim of this study was to assess generalized hypersensitivity in chronic unilateral shoulder pain, using pressure pain threshold (PPT) mappings of the infraspinatus muscle.

Does feedback based on FES-evoked nociceptive withdrawal reflex condition event-related desynchronization? An exploratory study with brain-computer interfaces.

Event-related desynchronization (ERD) is used in brain-computer interfaces (BCI) to detect the user's motor intention (MI) and convert it into a command for an actuator to provide sensory feedback or mobility, for example by means of functional electrical stimulation (FES). Recent studies have proposed to evoke the nociceptive withdrawal reflex (NWR) using FES, in order to evoke synergistic movements of the lower limb and to facilitate the gait rehabilitation of stroke patients. The use of NWR to provide sensorimotor feedback in ERD-based BCI is novel; thererfore, the conditioning effect that nociceptive stimuli might have on MI is still unknown.