Publications by authors named "Tanja Valmunen"
Article Synopsis
- The study examined the impact of the DRD2 gene variation on thermal pain sensitivity and the effectiveness of rTMS treatment in both healthy individuals and neuropathic pain patients.
- The DRD2 957C>T variant was found to affect pain detection thresholds and rTMS analgesic effects, with 957TT homozygotes experiencing the lowest thresholds and highest response to rTMS.
- In patients, the 957TT genotype was linked to more severe pain and a higher prevalence compared to a healthy population, highlighting the significant role of the dopamine system in pain management and potential personalized treatment options.
Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) has had partly incongruous effects on cutaneous sensibility, and there are no systematic studies on the effects of rTMS on facial sensory function. We assessed modulation of thermal sensitivity of facial skin in healthy subjects by navigated rTMS (10 Hz), enabling accurate localization of predefined cortical targets: right primary motor cortex (M1) of facial muscles, primary somatosensory cortex (S1) representing the cheek, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), and secondary somatosensory cortex (S2); the control site was occipital cortex (OCC). Applying signal detection theory, we investigated whether the rTMS-induced changes in heat-pain threshold (HPT) relate to an alteration in the subject's discriminative capacity (sensory factor) or response criterion (non-sensory factor).
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