Somatosensory cortical signature of facial nociception and vibrotactile touch–induced analgesia
Name
sciadv.abn6530.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
2.24 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
82112c861d69e667c6b97b2d60660bd1
Author(s)
Lu, Jinghao
Chen, Bin
Levy, Manuel
Xu, Peng
Han, Bao-Xia
Takatoh, Jun
Thompson, PM
He, Zhigang
Prevosto, Vincent
Wang, Fan
Date Issued
November 18, 2022
Journal
Science Advances
Publisher
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Citation
Lu, Jinghao, Chen, Bin, Levy, Manuel, Xu, Peng, Han, Bao-Xia et al. 2022. "Somatosensory cortical signature of facial nociception and vibrotactile touch–induced analgesia." Science Advances, 8 (46).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Pain relief by vibrotactile touch is a common human experience. Previous neurophysiological investigations of its underlying mechanism in animals focused on spinal circuits, while human studies suggested the involvement of supraspinal pathways. Here, we examine the role of primary somatosensory cortex (S1) in touch-induced mechanical and heat analgesia. We found that, in mice, vibrotactile reafferent signals from self-generated whisking significantly reduce facial nociception, which is abolished by specifically blocking touch transmission from thalamus to the barrel cortex (S1B). Using a signal separation algorithm that can decompose calcium signals into sensory-evoked, whisking, or face-wiping responses, we found that the presence of whisking altered nociceptive signal processing in S1B neurons. Analysis of S1B population dynamics revealed that whisking pushes the transition of the neural state induced by noxious stimuli toward the outcome of non-nocifensive actions. Thus, S1B integrates facial tactile and noxious signals to enable touch-mediated analgesia.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
10.1126/sciadv.abn6530
