Reply to Vlaeyen et al.

Abstract

We appreciate the letter by Vlaeyen et al. 2 as we hoped that our perspective 1 would contribute to a discussion. The network theory proposed by Vlaeyen et al. is interesting and overcomes some of the limitations with the central sensitization construct. In our perspectives article, we did not intend to cover all chronic pain types, but only localized pain after a localized physiological event. However, we agree that a dysfunction of a vulnerable learning network could be a sixth possibility in our Figure 1 and are very thankful to the authors for pointing this out.