RESEARCH ARTICLE Ultra-high-field imaging reveals increased whole brain connectivity underpins cognitive strategies that attenuate pain Enrico Schulz1,2*, Anne Stankewitz2, Anderson M Winkler1,3, Stephanie Irving2, Viktor Witkovsky´ 4, Irene Tracey1 1Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, FMRIB, Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; 2Department of Neurology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universita¨ t Mu¨ nchen, Munich, Germany; 3Emotion and Development Branch, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, United States; 4Department of Theoretical Methods, Institute of Measurement Science, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovakia Abstract We investigated how the attenuation of pain with cognitive interventions affects brain connectivity using neuroimaging and a whole brain novel analysis approach. While receiving tonic cold pain, 20 healthy participants performed three different pain attenuation strategies during simultaneous collection of functional imaging data at seven tesla. Participants were asked to rate their pain after each trial. We related the trial-by-trial variability of the attenuation performance to the trial-by-trial functional connectivity strength change of brain data. Across all conditions, we found that a higher performance of pain attenuation was predominantly associated with higher functional connectivity. Of note, we observed an association between low pain and high connectivity for regions that belong to brain regions long associated with pain processing, the insular and cingulate cortices. For one of the cognitive strategies (safe place), the performance of pain attenuation was explained by diffusion tensor imaging metrics of increased white matter integrity. *For correspondence:
[email protected] Competing interests: The Introduction authors declare that no An increased perception of pain is generally associated with increased cortical activity; this has been competing interests exist.