Peripheral Nerve Diseases Clinical Trial
Official title:
Mechanisms of Neuropathic Pain: Investigation by Contact Heat Evoked Potential
In order to clarify the normal components of thermal and painful evoked potentials by heat in normal subjects of both genders and different age group, to clarify the effect of specific anatomy in pain transduction, transmission and modification, and to establish the effect of peripheral nerve and their terminal free ending on the nociceptive transduction, the investigators will use heat stimulation on normal controls and patients with neurological diseases to clarify such issues.
Only a few studies focus on clinical diseases like neuropathic pain or neurogenic pain.
Little is known about the differences between normal and pathogenic pain processing. It is
an opportunity to apply EEG, ERPs in the clinical fields. In many clinical conditions, brain
lesions provide a chance to study the possible roles of one neural structure in pain
integration and processing. In addition the applications of EEG/ERPs on clinical conditions
may be help in the understanding about mechanism and genesis of pain in pathogenic
conditions, the diagnosis of pathogenic pain, and the therapeutic aspects of these abnormal
pain senses.
One limit in the study of human pain is the inappropriate stimulation method. Evoked
potentials by contact heat have previously been difficult to elicit due to slow temperature
rise times associated with thermal stimulators. However recently, the CHEPS (Contact
Heat-Evoked Potential Stimulator) is developed, which uses a newly developed heat-foil
technology and can create a rapid heating rate (up to 70°C/sec). The baseline and peak
temperature and the rising time can be precisely controlled. It provides a non-invasive
technique in the investigation of human pain activation related to thermal and nociceptive
pathways involved in pain processing. Unlike the heat stimulation delivered by laser, CHEPS
can deliver noxious thermal stimuli repeatedly to a large area of skin to evoke a pain
response of A-Delta and C fibers. In addition the rate of stimulation can be rapid to lead
to the effect of temporal summation. When used with an EEG recording system, a patient's
responses to pain perception and evoked potentials (EPs) can be recorded, which provide
objective information about integrity of the nociceptive afferents of peripheral nerve
system, spinal cord, as well as the brain response of different structures. The CHEPS
provide the investigators a practical and convenient tool in clinical application to study
pain. The investigators will use the CHEPS as stimulation for studying the heat evoked
potentials and analyze the difference between the normal subjects and patients with
peripheral nerve diseases. These might help to clarify the mechanism of neuropathic pain.
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N/A
| Status | Clinical Trial | Phase | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Completed |
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