Vasopressin and Pain Perception in the Brain

Summary

The feeling of pain is not just a sensory experience, but is also influenced by emotions, beliefs and expectations, making pain a highly subjective experience. This is evident in clinical practice, where the behavior of the physician and the treatment context can strongly influence the pain experience of patients. Research has shown that patients' expectation that a treatment will reduce pain influences individual perception of pain, even if the treatment has no active ingredient. The expectancy-induced analgesia emerges due to a modulation of the individual pain experience of patients by an engagement of endogenous inhibitory systems in the central nervous system. The development of expectancy-induced analgesia can be generated in several ways. The investigators have previously demonstrated that social information and observational learning (e.g. the patient observes analgesia in another person receiving a treatment) can lead to expectancy-induced analgesia and pain reduction. However, the neural mechanisms (mechanisms in the brain) of how these expectancies are acquired and the neural mechanisms of analgesia induced by observational learning are unknown. The investigators recently established a procedure to investigate neural mechanisms of observational learning in placebo analgesia. Here the investigators propose to investigate the influence of vasopressin, a neurotransmitter that is important for social interaction, on observational learning. The investigators will use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a non-invasive method, to investigate neural activity in humans. Participants will either receive vasopressin or saline with a nasal spray. During fMRI scanning, participants will then undergo an observational learning phase, where the study participants will learn the experience of analgesia in another person through a video, and a testing phase, where participants will perceive painful stimulations with the same cues as the observational phase. The comparison of the vasopressin group and the saline group will allow us to investigate how vasopressin influences behavioral effects of observational learning on pain perception as well as its effect on the neural processing of observational learning. A better understanding of how the human brain processes observationally-induced analgesia would allow us to improve the therapeutic context of pain treatments by increasing the contextual factors which help patients cope with pain.

Timeline

Start

2018-09-17

Primary completion

2026-09-30

Completion

2026-12-31

Publications

• Background Colagiuri B, Schenk LA, Kessler MD, Dorsey SG, Colloca L. The placebo effect: From concepts to genes. Neuroscience. 2015 Oct 29;307:171-90. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroscience.2015.08.017. Epub 2015 Aug 10.
• Background Colloca L, Benedetti F. Placebo analgesia induced by social observational learning. Pain. 2009 Jul;144(1-2):28-34. doi: 10.1016/j.pain.2009.01.033. Epub 2009 Mar 10.
• Background Colloca L, Pine DS, Ernst M, Miller FG, Grillon C. Vasopressin Boosts Placebo Analgesic Effects in Women: A Randomized Trial. Biol Psychiatry. 2016 May 15;79(10):794-802. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2015.07.019. Epub 2015 Aug 4.
• Background Schenk LA, Sprenger C, Geuter S, Buchel C. Expectation requires treatment to boost pain relief: an fMRI study. Pain. 2014 Jan;155(1):150-157. doi: 10.1016/j.pain.2013.09.024. Epub 2013 Sep 26.
• Background Born J, Lange T, Kern W, McGregor GP, Bickel U, Fehm HL. Sniffing neuropeptides: a transnasal approach to the human brain. Nat Neurosci. 2002 Jun;5(6):514-6. doi: 10.1038/nn849. No abstract available.

Drugs

Indications

No indication recorded.