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Migraine patients show heightened brain responses to others’ physical pain, but not emotional pain, indicating domain-specific hyperreactivity.
Migraine sufferers exhibit substantially heightened brain activity when witnessing others in physical pain—but not emotional pain—according to a new functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research, pointing to a domain-specific alteration in pain empathy networks.
In this neuroimaging study, researchers assessed 21 individuals with migraine and matched healthy controls using a validated fMRI paradigm that captured empathic responses to 2 types of stimuli: physical pain (e.g., noxious events) and affective pain (e.g., facial expressions). The goal was to determine whether migraine is connected with generalized or domain-specific abnormalities in empathy-related brain function.
The results revealed amplified activation in the bilateral inferior frontal gyrus—particularly on the right—in migraine patients during the observation of physical pain. Importantly, this neural hyperactivity was markedly correlated with the intensity of pain experienced during actual migraine attacks. No such differences were witnessed for affective pain stimuli. Whole-brain analysis using multivariate neurofunctional signatures confirmed this specificity.
The predictive model attained 100% accuracy in distinguishing migraine patients from controls based on physical pain empathy responses, underscoring a robust and selective neural marker of altered pain processing. Contrary to the hypothesis of generalized hyperreactivity, the findings suggest that migraine involves a distinct hyperresponsivity within the pain empathy network—specifically for physical pain stimuli.
Given the shared neural pathways between pain empathy and actual pain processing, this points to dysfunction in pain modulation mechanisms, with the inferior frontal gyrus likely playing a central regulatory role. The study highlights the potential of using multivariate brain signatures as translational tools for recognizing abnormal affective and pain-related processes in clinical populations, including those with migraine.
The Journal of Headache and Pain
Regional and whole-brain neurofunctional alterations during pain empathic processing of physical but not affective pain in migraine patients
Dan Liu et al.
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