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Comment
. 2016 May 3;113(18):E2474-5.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1600282113. Epub 2016 Apr 19.

Pain in the ACC?

Affiliations
Comment

Pain in the ACC?

Tor D Wager et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .
No abstract available

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
The dACC is not selective for pain. (A) dACC activation in studies of (Top) cognitive control [go/no-go (8)], (Middle) response conflict (9), and (Bottom) reward (10). If pain were considered the “best interpretation” of dACC activity, these studies would be erroneously classified as pain-related. (B) Posterior probabilities of study topic given activation in the pain-selective dACC, using empirical priors. Center shows Lieberman and Eisenberger’s (1) pain-selective dACC coordinates. They find that seven out of eight of these locations are highly selective for pain, including the one circled [Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) coordinates 0, 10, 34]. The top terms in Neurosynth’s “reverse inference” list are indeed pain-related. However, this does not reflect the actual topics studied or the relevant posterior probabilities. We (T.D.W. and laboratory members) manually identified the topics of the first 240 (of 647 total) studies reporting brain activation within 8 mm of MNI coordinates 0, 10, 34 based on the paper titles and abstracts, and used them to calculate the posterior probabilities shown in the figure. The probability that the study topic was pain was 12%. More broadly, 50% of dACC activation studies were focused on cognition (blue), 20% were focused on socioemotional processes (green), and 19% were focused on pain, somatosensation, or other somatic referents (red). The remaining studies were difficult to categorize or irrelevant (mainly resting state and methodological studies). This analysis does not imply that there is no pain-related information in the dACC, but it does imply that dACC is not especially selective for either pain or a special class of survival-relevant functions. Images courtesy of (A, Top) ref. , with permission from Elsevier, and (A, Middle) ref. . A, Bottom is a schematic based on findings in ref. .

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References

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