The relationship between subjective pain ratings and sympathetic outflow during a cold pressor test
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pain is the leading source of morbidity worldwide and a global clinical and societal challenge. Subjective pain scores are commonly employed in pain-centric research to quantify pain despite the presence of established organismic and environmental sources of intra- and interindividual variability in these scores. As a result, methods for the quantification of pain continue to be the focus of ongoing work in the pain field, including the search for objective biomarkers for pain.To that end, muscle sympathetic nerve activity (MSNA) has been proposed as an objective biomarker of pain. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between changes in MSNA and changes in subjective pain ratings (PR) during an acute pain stimulus (i.e., cold pressor test (CPT)). Additionally, we examined whether MSNA measures were sensitive to within-subject changes in PR across time. We hypothesized that MSNA would be positively correlated with PR, and that both would increase steadily and concomitantly throughout a 6-minute CPT. We obtained integrated MSNA using peroneal microneurography (NeuroAmp, ADI; MSNA quantified as burst incidence (bursts/100hb)) during 10 minutes of supine rest and CPT in 10 young (aged 18-35 y) and healthy individuals (n=5 men). Participants reported PR on a numerical rating scale (0-10) at rest and during the CPT (timepoints: 30-s, 120-s, 240-s, and 330-s). One-way repeated measures ANOVAs assessed whether PR and MSNA changed over the CPT. PR increased over the CPT (p= 0.03) with a mean increase of 1±3 rating scale points from 30-s to 330-s. There was no main effect of time on MSNA (p=0.051), as it increased initially, but then decreased gradually thereafter. A linear regression analysis of the relationship between absolute PR and MSNA demonstrated a moderate positive correlation (r=0.43, p<0.01); however, relative changes in PR and MSNA over time (i.e., timepoints expressed relative to rest) were not correlated (r=-0.19, p=0.25). Meanwhile, acute changes in MSNA and PR from timepoint-to-timepoint (calculated as timepoint - previous timepoint) were strongly correlated (r=0.62, p<0.01). In summary, we observed similar patterns of change in subjective PR scores and MSNA during a CPT. These data suggest that MSNA is a valuable biomarker in the quantification of pain due to its consistency with subjective measures of pain. This research was funded by the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada. This is the full abstract presented at the American Physiology Summit 2023 meeting and is only available in HTML format. There are no additional versions or additional content available for this abstract. Physiology was not involved in the peer review process.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".