Prestimulus alpha oscillation in somatosensory areas predicts subjective pain intensity

Abstract

Introduction: Pain does not only reflect the neural processing of nociceptive information, but is also influenced by various psycho-social contexts and psycho-physiological factors (Hu et al., 2014). Being elicited by noxious stimulation (e.g., laser heat pulse), the perceived intensity of pain has been well documented to be coded by the changes of poststimulus neural activity, including N2-P2 complex in laser-evoked potentials (LEPs) (Iannetti et al., 2005) and event-related synchronization/desynchronization (Gross et al., 2007; Zhang et al., 2012, Mouraux et al., 2003). However, the relationship between pain intensity and the poststimulus neural activity is not universal, since such relationship would be substantially influenced by the baseline brain state (Gilbert and Sigman, 2007). In other word, the baseline brain state, reflected by prestimulus neural oscillations, could modulate the sensory processing of nociceptive information, and the subsequent pain perception. In the present study, we aimed to assess such modulations using an electroencephalographic (EEG) dataset collected from a large population of healthy volunteers (n = 96) .....