Sleep, Experimental Pain and Clinical Pain in Patients with Chronic Musculoskeletal Pain and Healthy Controls

Purpose: Everyday variations in night sleep in healthy pain-free subjects are at most weakly associated with pain, whereas strong alterations (eg, sleep deprivation, insomnia) lead to hyperalgesic pain changes. Since it remains unclear how substantial sleep alterations need to be in order to affect the pain system and lead to a coupling of both functions, the present study aimed at providing sufficient variance for co-variance analyses by examining a sample consisting of both healthy subjects and chronic pain patients. Methods: A sample of 20 chronic musculoskeletal pain patients and 20 healthy controls was examined. This sample was assumed to show high inter-individual variability in sleep and pain, as pain patients frequently report sleep disturbances, whereas healthy subjects were required to be pain-free and normal sleepers. Sleep of two non-consecutive nights was measured using portable polysomnography and questionnaires. Experimental pain parameters (pressure pain thresholds (PPT), temporal summation of pain (TSP), conditioned pain modulation (CPM)) and situational pain catastrophizing (SCQ) were assessed in laboratory sessions before and after sleep. Pain patients’ clinical pain was assessed via questionnaire. Results: As expected, both groups differed in several sleep parameters (reduced total sleep time and sleep efficiency, more time awake after sleep onset, lower subjective sleep quality in the patients) and in a few pain parameters (lower PPTs in the patients). In contrast, no differences were found in TSP, CPM, and SCQ. Contrary to our expectations, regression analyses indicated no prediction of overnight pain changes by sleep parameters. Conclusion: Since sleep parameters were hardly apt to predict overnight pain changes, this leaves the association of both systems mainly unproven when using between-subject variance for verification

Attentional processing of pain faces and other emotional faces in chronic pain–an eye-tracking study

Altered attentional processing of pain-associated stimuli–which might take the form of either avoidance or enhanced vigilance–is thought to be implicated in the development and maintenance of chronic pain. In contrast to reaction time tasks like the dot probe, eye tracking allows for tracking the time course of visual attention and thus differentiating early and late attentional processes. Our study aimed at investigating visual attention to emotional faces in patients with chronic musculoskeletal pain (N = 20) and matched pain-free controls (N = 20). Emotional faces (pain, angry, happy) were presented in pairs with a neutral face for 2000 ms each. Three parameters were determined: First fixation probabilities, fixation durations (overall and divided in four 500 ms intervals) and a fixation bias score as the relative fixation duration of emotional faces compared to neutral faces. There were no group differences in any of the parameters. First fixation probabilities were lower for pain faces than for angry faces. Overall, we found longer fixation duration on emotional compared to neutral faces (‘emotionality bias’), which is in accord with previous research. However, significant longer fixation duration compared to the neutral face was detected only for happy and angry but not for pain faces. In addition, fixation durations as well as bias scores yielded evidence for vigilant-avoidant processing of pain faces in both groups. These results suggest that attentional bias towards pain-associated stimuli might not generally differentiate between healthy individuals and chronic pain patients. Exaggerated attentional bias in patients might occur only under specific circumstances, e.g., towards stimulus material specifically relating to the specific pain of the patients under study or under high emotional distress

Triggering On/Off States of Photoswitchable Probes in Biological Environments

The use of hybrid systems for which the change in properties of one component triggers the change in properties of the other is of outmost importance when “on/off” states are needed. For such a reason, azobenzene compounds are one of the most used probes due to their high photoswitching efficiency. In this study, we consider a new derivative of azobenzene interacting with different lipid membrane phases as a versatile fluorescent probe for phase recognition. By means of a multiscale approach, we found that the cis and trans conformers have different positions and orientations in the different lipid membranes (DOPC for the liquid disordered phase and DPPC for the gel phase), and these have a profound effect on the optical properties of the system, for both one and two photon absorption. In fact, we found that the cis state is the “on” state when the probe is inserted into the DOPC membrane, while it is in the “off” state in the DPPC membrane. This behavior enhances the selectivity of this probe for phase recognition, since the different environments will generate different responses on the same conformer of the probe. The same effect is found for the fluorescence anisotropy analysis, for which the trans (cis) isomer in DOPC (DPPC) presents a fast decay time. Due to the “on/off” effect it is possible to screen the different membrane phases via fluorescence decay time analysis, making this new probe versatile for phase detection

Dual photoisomerization mechanism of azobenzene embedded in a lipid membrane

The photoisomerization of chromophores embedded in biological environments is of high importance for biomedical applications, but it is still challenging to define the photoisomerization mechanism both experimentally and computationally. We present here a computational study of the azobenzene molecule embedded in a DPPC lipid membrane, and assess the photoisomerization mechanism by means of the quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics surface hopping (QM/MM-SH) method. We observe that while the trans-to-cis isomerization is a slow process governed by a torsional mechanism due to the strong interaction with the environment, the cis-to-trans mechanism is completed in sub-ps time scale and is governed by a pedal-like mechanism in which both weaker interactions with the environment and a different geometry of the potential energy surface play a key role.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

The Molecular Mechanism of Photochromism in Photo-Enolizable Quinoline and Naphtyridine Derivatives

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