Neural correlates of painful genital touch in women with vulvar vestibulitis syndrome
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Vulvar vestibulitis syndrome (VVS) is a common cause of dyspareunia in pre-menopausal women. Recent evidence points to the importance of the sensory component in VVS, particularly the heightened processing of tactile and pain sensation in the vulvar vestibule. The goal of the present study was to examine the neural basis of heightened sensitivity to touch (i.e. allodynia) in women with VVS. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we compared regions of neural activity in 14 women with VVS and 14 age- and contraceptive-matched control women in response to the application of mild and moderate pressure to the posterior portion of the vulvar vestibule. Intensity and unpleasantness ratings were recorded after each scan; these ratings were significantly higher for women with VVS than controls. All women with VVS described moderate pressure as painful and unpleasant, and 6 of the 14 women with VVS described mild pressure as painful and unpleasant. In contrast, none of the stimuli was painful for control women. Correspondingly, women with VVS showed more significant activations during pressure levels that they found to be either painful or non-painful than did controls during comparable pressure levels. During pressure described as painful by women with VVS, they had significantly higher activation levels in the insular and frontal cortical regions than did control women. These results suggest that women with VVS exhibit an augmentation of genital sensory processing, which is similar to that observed for a variety of syndromes causing hypersensitivity, including fibromyalgia, idiopathic back pain, irritable bowel syndrome, and neuropathic pain.
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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".