Changes in Pain Perception and Descending Inhibitory Controls Start at Middle Age in Healthy Adults
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Previous studies have shown a reduction of diffuse noxious inhibitory controls (DNICs) in elderly adults compared with younger adults. Unfortunately, little is known regarding the developmental course of DNIC deficits and so it is still unclear whether middle-aged adults also show a DNIC deficit. The aims of the present study were to better characterize the developmental time course of the change in DNIC response by adding a middle-aged group. The role of expectations was also investigated. METHODS: The pain thresholds (PTs) of 20 young, 20 middle-aged, and 20 healthy elderly volunteers were assessed before and during a cold pressor task (water at 7 degrees C). Acute nociceptive stimuli were administered using a thermode and consisted of a range of painless and painful heat pulses. RESULTS: Analyses showed that thermal PTs increase by middle age but that the DNIC-induced increase in PT dampens progressively with advancing age. DNIC response was negatively correlated with advancing age, however, expectations regarding DNIC efficacy did not vary with age. This suggests that age-related changes in the size of the DNIC response are not best explained by an age-related change in expectation. DISCUSSION: The findings tell us that changes in pain perception and endogenous pain modulation arrive earlier than previously suggested. Studies on aging and pain should include a middle-aged group when comparing pain measures across the adult lifespan.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.021 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 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) | 0.000 | 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 it