Dose-dependent Effects of Propofol on the Central Processing of Thermal Pain
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Anatomic and physiologic data show that multiple regions of the forebrain are activated by pain. However, the effect of anesthetic level on nociceptive input to these regions is not well understood. METHODS: The authors used positron emission tomography to measure the effect of various concentrations of propofol on pain-evoked changes in regional cerebral blood flow. Fifteen volunteers were scanned while warm and painful heat stimuli were presented to the volar forearm using a contact thermode during administration of target propofol concentrations of 0.0 microg/ml (alert control), 0.5 microg/ml (mild sedation), 1.5 microg/ml (moderate sedation), and 3.5 microg/ml (unconsciousness). RESULTS: During the 0.5-microg/ml target propofol concentration (mild sedation), the subjects' pain ratings increased relative to the alert control condition; correspondingly, pain-evoked regional cerebral blood flow increased in the thalamus and the anterior cingulate cortex. In contrast, when subjects lost consciousness (3.5 microg/ml), pain-evoked responses in the thalamus and the anterior cingulate cortex were no longer observed, whereas significant pain-evoked activation remained in the insular cortex. CONCLUSION: These data show that propofol has a dose-dependent effect on thalamocortical transfer of nociceptive information but that some pain-evoked cortical activity remains after loss of consciousness.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".