Project Overview

At first, we studied the pain system (gray circle) and motor system (yellow circle) separately for healthy adults and chronic pain patients (top to bottom). In project 1, we use EEG and behavioral measurement to characterize neural oscillations of acute pain processing in healthy subjects and chronic pain patient population. We identified increase in gamma and theta power in the medial prefrontal cortex and decrease in lower beta power in the sensorimotor cortex were associated with increase in acute pain perception in healthy controls (Misra et al., J Neurophys 2017). In the motor system, we identified that upper limb movement is associated with an increase in theta and reduction in alpha and beta power in the somatosensory regions (Ofori et al., 2015). Further, we used a paradigm in which voluntary movements were executed during an ongoing pain-eliciting stimulus to test the hypothesis that a pain-related suppression of beta oscillations would facilitate the initiation of a subsequent voluntary movement. The result showed that upper limb movement with concurrent heat stimulation lead to greater reductions in alpha and beta power in sensorimotor regions (Misra et al., 2016). Lastly, we investigated the intersection of movement and pain in people with chronic musculoskeletal pain condition, where the pain is intrinsically induced by movement as we called movement-evoked pain (Project 2/ Thesis project).