Thalamus, Clinical Visceral Pain, Human Imaging

Ladabaum, Uri

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-28753-4_4451

Uri Ladabaum³

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Synonyms

Thalamus and cardiac pain; Thalamus and gastrointestinal pain; Thalamus and visceral pain (positron emission tomography or functional magnetic resonance imaging)

Definition

Visceral pain arises from the internal organs, such as the heart and the gastrointestinal tract. In contrast, somatic pain arises from the skin and deeper tissues, including muscle. The central nervous system regions activated by visceral pain in humans, including the thalamus, have been studied noninvasively with positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), functional imaging techniques that measure increased regional cerebral blood flow as a marker of neuronal activation.

Characteristics

Thalamic activation (defined as a statistically significant increase in regional blood flow during the condition of interest) has been reported in many but not all functional cerebral imaging studies of visceral pain in humans. The cerebral representation of visceral pain was first...

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Authors and Affiliations

Gastroenterology & Hepatology, Stanford Cancer Institute, 450 Broadway St MC 6341 Pavilion A, 1st Floor, Redwood City, CA, 94063, USA
Uri Ladabaum

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Uri Ladabaum
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Correspondence to Uri Ladabaum .

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Editors and Affiliations

Department of Anesthesiology, Center for Pain Research, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Gerald F. Gebhart
Physiologisches Institut der, Universität Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany
Robert F. Schmidt

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Ladabaum, U. (2013). Thalamus, Clinical Visceral Pain, Human Imaging. In: Gebhart, G.F., Schmidt, R.F. (eds) Encyclopedia of Pain. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28753-4_4451

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28753-4_4451
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-28752-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-28753-4
eBook Packages: Biomedical and Life SciencesReference Module Biomedical and Life Sciences

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