Vasopressin and Pain Perception in the Brain

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…

This description comes directly from the study's public registry record.

Research Coordinator  ·  410-706-5975  ·  nrscollocalab@umaryland.edu

Rachel Massalee, MS  ·  rmassalee@umaryland.edu

Always discuss trial participation with your own doctor first.

Get one email when the public record changes — results posted, or the study's status changes. Nothing else, ever.

We email about this public record only. Unsubscribe anytime with one click. Never medical advice.