DREADDING Pain: Excitatory and Inhibitory Neurons in the Periaqueductal Gray Modulate Pain
Material below summarizes the article Divergent Modulation of Nociception by Glutamatergic and GABAergic Neuronal Subpopulations in the Periaqueductal Gray, published on March 17, 2017, in eNeuro and authored by Vijay K. Samineni, Jose G. Grajales-Reyes, Bryan A. Copits, Daniel E. O’Brien, Sarah L. Trigg, Adrian M. Gomez, Michael R. Bruchas, and Robert W. Gereau.
Pain is a conscious experience that encompasses sensory, emotional, and cognitive dimensions. Pain signals detected by nerve fibers in the skin, tissue, and peripheral organs are transmitted into the brain via the spinal cord. Once perception of pain occurs, several regions in the brain exert a powerful control of incoming pain signals in the spinal cord.
An important example of this is the lack of pain perception that can be experienced when people are in “life or death” situations. One of these brain regions, the periaqueductal gray (PAG), is an evolutionarily conserved structure in the midbrain. Electrical stimulation of the PAG causes profound pain relief, or analgesia. This robust analgesia is mediated, in part, by descending connections to other regions in the brainstem.
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