Influence of Propranolol on Conditioned Pain Modulation

Overview

An extensive amount of studies indicate that conditioned pain modulation (CPM) test paradigms can be of use to evaluate the efficacy of the endogenous pain inhibition pathway in healthy controls and pain patients. A number of studies indicate that the autonomic nervous system (ANS) responds to painful stimulation by parasympathetic activity withdrawal and up-regulation of sympathetic activity (flight-or-fight mode), but it remains unknown whether these responses predict individual pain susceptibility or CPM efficacy and whether different pain modalities evoke different physiological stress responses, i.e. do individuals with low pain tolerance exhibit more vigorous ANS responses when subjected to controlled acute pain stimuli, and do high ANS responsiveness to pain coincide with altered psychophysical pain levels/CPM efficacy. This study aims to investigate the effect of ANS responsiveness on CPM paradigms and to investigate if an exogenous, pharmaceutically induced decrease in the sympathetic drive of the ANS will yield decreased CPM efficacy.

Conditions

Interventions