AI Article Synopsis
- Itch is a strange and annoying feeling that scientists have been studying to figure out how it works in our brains.
- Researchers discovered that a part of the brain called the prelimbic cortex (PrL) plays a big role in how we feel and respond to itchiness.
- They found out that focusing on other things can actually change how we experience itch, showing that certain brain cells manage both our attention and our itchy feelings.
Article Abstract
Itch is a complex and unpleasant sensory experience. Recent studies have begun to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying the modulation of sensory and emotional components of itch in the brain. However, the key brain regions and neural mechanism involved in modulating the attentional processing of itch remain elusive. Here, we showed that the prelimbic cortex (PrL) is associated with itch processing and that the manipulation of itch-responsive neurons in the PrL significantly disrupted itch-induced scratching. Interestingly, we found that increasing attentional bias toward a distracting stimulus could disturb itch processing. We also demonstrated the existence of a population of attention-related neurons in the PrL that drive attentional bias to regulate itch processing. Importantly, itch-responsive neurons and attention-related neurons significantly overlapped in the PrL and were mutually interchangeable in the regulation of itch processing at the cellular activity level. Our results revealed that the PrL regulates itch processing by controlling attentional bias.
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Source |
|---|---|
| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9816985 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2022.105829 | DOI Listing |
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