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Hindi Research Article
Using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging to Describe Pain Pathways in the Oldest Old: A Case Study of a Healthy 97-year-old Female
| Todd Monroe1*, Andrew Dornan2, Michael A. Carter3 and Ronald L. Cowan4 | |
| 1Vanderbilt University School of Nursing, Vanderbilt University Institute of Imaging Science, Nashville, Tennessee, USA | |
| 2Vanderbilt Psychiatric Neuroimaging Program, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, Tennessee, USA | |
| 3The University of Tennessee Health Science Center College of Nursing, Memphis Tennessee USA | |
| 4Vanderbilt Addiction Center, Vanderbilt Psychiatric Neuroimaging Program, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, Tennessee, USA | |
| Corresponding Author : | Todd Monroe Vanderbilt University School of Nursing Vanderbilt University Institute of Imaging Science 461 21st Avenue South, Nashville Tennessee, USA E-mail: todd.b.monroe@vanderbilt.edu |
| Received June 20, 2012; Accepted August 21, 2012; Published August 27, 2012 | |
| Citation: Monroe T, Dornan A, Carter MA, Cowan RL (2012) Using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging to Describe Pain Pathways in the ‘Oldest Old’: A Case Study of a Healthy 97-year-old Female. J Pain Relief 1:111. doi: 10.4172/2167-0846.1000111 | |
| Copyright: © 2012 Monroe T, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. | |
Abstract
The prevalence of painful medical conditions increases with age. Pain differences in older adulthood are of special concern because we do not know how brain changes in healthy aging may alter the sensory and affective response to pain. Over the last two decades, neuroimaging studies have described interconnected brain regions that mediate pain processing. In particular, imaging techniques have been used to describe brain activation in networks of structures comprising the lateral and medial pain systems. The lateral and medial pain networks are generally associated with the sensory-discriminative and affective-motivational dimensions of pain respectively. Key structures that are associated with the lateral pain network include specific nuclei in the thalamus and primary (S1) and secondary somatosensory (S2) cortex while different but specific nuclei in the thalamus, as well as regions in the insular and cingulate cortices are associated with the medial pain network
