查看文章

Although depressive mood is an important psychological determinate of chronic pain, the neural circuitry that mediates its influence on the pain experience is largely unknown. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) to investigate the neurophysiological interactions between depressive symptoms and disease-relevant pain in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients. RA is associated with chronic joint pain and swelling, but peripheral joint pathology often does not fully explain the amount of pain a patient experiences. We investigated the neural circuitry that relates joint pain and depressive symptoms and contrasted this with experimental heat pain. We hypothesized that (1) depressive symptoms influence the cerebral processing of provoked joint pain in RA, and (2) the interaction of depressive symptoms with pain processing contributes to the pain RA patients experience on a daily basis. Twenty patients …