Pain: Basic Science | Pain Management: Chronic Clinical
Test-retest reliability of thermal temporal summation using an individualized protocol
Jiang-Ti Kong*, Kevin Johnson, Raymond Balise, Sean Mackey
*Corresponding author: Jiang-Ti Kong
Department of Anesthesiology, Division of Pain Management, Stanford University Hospital and Clinics, Palo Alto, CA, USA
F1000Posters 2012, 3: 672 (poster) [English]
Poster [881.92 KB] | Recommended by F1000Prime | Resulting articles
Presented at
31st Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Pain Society 2012,
16 - 19 May 2012, 286
Thermal temporal summation (TS) describes the increased perception of pain due to the repetitive applications of a brief, noxious heat stimulus (1). It is a promising behavioral correlate of central nociceptive facilitation (2). However, many current technologies to generate TS (where universal heat stimuli are used) are limited by the inability to generate any increase in pain perception in up to 50% of the participants due to floor or ceiling effects (3). Data is also limited on the temporal stability of thermal TS (4).
We developed a novel method to generate thermal TS by individually adjusting the baseline and peak temperatures of the thermal pulses. Using this method, we were able to achieve increased pain perception in over 90% of the healthy volunteers tested. We also showed TS generated this way was stable both within an hour and within one week.
We plan to extend our study by;
- individually optimizing TS using our method in chronic pain populations.
- examining the test-retest reliability of thermal TS in patients with chronic pain, and over longer periods (weeks to months).
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No relevant competing interests disclosed.
National Institutes of Health (NIH), K24 DA029262
National Institutes of Health (NIH), T32 GM 89626-2
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