Brain functional imaging contributions in osteoarthritis-related pain: A viewpoint.

Objective: Neuroimaging investigations are critical to provide a more direct assessment of brain disturbances associated with osteoarthritis (OA)-related pain, and to better understand its pathophysiology to develop new treatment strategies. This viewpoint aims to summarize the importance of the brain in OA pain.

Method: A European working group on pain in osteoarthritis GO-PAIN (Going Inside Osteoarthritis-related Pain Phenotyping) has been created to work on a global assessment of the OA-related pain.

Effects of multiple transcranial magnetic stimulation sessions on pain relief in patients with chronic neuropathic pain: A French cohort study in real-world clinical practice.

Background: Current clinical trials indicate that repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is effective in reducing drug-resistant neuropathic pain (NP). However, there is a lack of studies evaluating the long-term feasibility and clinical efficacy of rTMS in large patient cohorts in real-world conditions.

Methods: In this retrospective cohort study, we analysed 12 years of clinical data to assess the long-term analgesic effects of 20 Hz rTMS over the primary motor cortex in patients with NP.

Pain cues override identity cues in baby cries.

Baby cries can convey both static information related to individual identity and dynamic information related to the baby's emotional and physiological state. How do these dimensions interact? Are they transmitted independently, or do they compete against one another? Here we show that the universal acoustic expression of pain in distress cries overrides individual differences at the expense of identity signaling. Our acoustic analysis show that pain cries, compared with discomfort cries, are characterized by a more unstable source, thus interfering with the production of identity cues.

Fractal Similarity of Pain Brain Networks.

The conscious perception of pain is the result of dynamic interactions of neural activities from local brain regions to distributed brain networks. Mapping out the networks of functional connections between brain regions that form and disperse when an experimental participant received nociceptive stimulations allow to characterize the pattern of network connections related to the pain experience.Although the pattern of intra- and inter-areal connections across the brain are incredibly complex, they appear also largely scale free, with "fractal" connectivity properties reproducing at short and long-time scales.