08:30 - 10:00
Wed-A7-Talk VI-
Wed-Talk VI-
Room: A7
Chair/s:
Angelika Dierolf
The aging population is disproportionally affected by pain and its consequences. Aging is known to affect neurobiological aspects of pain perception and has been associated with a deterioration of descending pain inhibitory mechanisms. However, little is known about whether cognitive pain modulatory mechanisms are preserved in the older age. Here, we present a series of studies on cognitive and situational factors influencing pain processing and the efficacy of cognitive pain modulation on the behavioral and (neuro)physiological level, focusing on underlying neural mechanisms to gain insight in the changes of the aging brain associated with pain processing and pain modulation.
Ana María González Roldán will start presenting data from several electrophysiological studies examining how aging and chronic pain may mutually contribute to enhanced pain perception. Further expanding on chronic pain, Joukje Oosterman will present a study on the underlying neural mechanism of loss of control over pain in aging, a predictor for future chronic pain. She will focus on age-related changes in function and EEG-connectivity in brain circuits involved in pain processing in relation to top-down cognitive modulation of pain control. Turning to distraction from pain as a top-down inhibitory process, Marian van der Meulen will discuss the relationship between functional connectivity during resting state and the distraction effect size in younger and older healthy adults. The role of executive functions and age-related cognitive decline in distraction from pain is addressed by Angelika Dierolf, presenting results of an EEG study. Finally, Sven Philipsen will discuss the impact of acute stress on the efficacy of distraction from pain in young and older adults.
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RESTING STATE FUNCTIONAL CONNECTIVITY MARKERS FOR THE EFFICACY OF COGNITVE PAIN MODULATION IN AGING
Wed-A7-Talk VI-03
Presented by: Marian van der Meulen
Marian van der Meulen 1, Katharina Rischer 1, Angelika Dierolf 1, Ana Maria Gonzalez-Roldan 2, Pedro Montoya 2, Fernand Anton 1
1 Department of Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, 2 Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience and Clinical Psychology, Research Institute of Health Sciences, University of the Balearic Islands, Spain
A growing number of studies suggest that aging is associated with a decrease in efficacy of cognitive pain modulation. Resting state functional connectivity (rsFC) analysis of the brain offers one way of investigating the potential neural mechanisms that may underly this age-related decline. In this study, 32 young (26.7 ± 4.3 years) and 32 healthy older (68.3 ± 7.1 years) adults underwent a 6-minute resting state fMRI scan, as well as a pain distraction paradigm. In the latter, participants received painful heat stimuli while performing either an easy or a difficult working memory task. We performed region-of-interest (ROI) to ROI rsFC analysis of the imaging data, focusing on regions implicated in pain processing and descending pain control. We then examined the relationship between rsFC parameters and the magnitude of the distraction effect (the reduction in perceived pain intensity during the difficult vs the easy task). Older adults showed reduced connectivity compared to young adults between several descending pain modulatory regions, including the ACC and PAG, the right secondary somatosensory cortex (SII) and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and between the ACC and left amygdala. Importantly, rsFC in older adults correlated positively with the distraction effect, between several regions including the right SI and right amygdala, the left SI and right insula and between the ACC and left amygdala. Our findings thus demonstrate, for the first time, that reduced cognitive pain modulation in older age is directly associated with decreased rsFC within key nodes of the descending pain control network.
Keywords: pain, cognitive pain modulation, aging, functional connectivity, resting state fMRI
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