Variations in the Human Pain Stress Experience Mediated by Ventral and Dorsal Basal Ganglia Dopamine Activity

Abstract

In addition to its involvement in motor control and in encoding reward value, increasing evidence also implicates basal ganglia dopaminergic mechanisms in responses to stress and aversive stimuli. Basal ganglia dopamine (DA) neurotransmission may then respond to environmental events depending on their saliency, orienting the subsequent responses of the organism to both positive and negative stimuli. Here we examined the involvement of DA neurotransmission in the human response to pain, a robust physical and emotional stressor across species. Positron emission tomography with the DA D 2 receptor antagonist radiotracer

Affective neuroscience of pleasure: reward in humans and animals

“…Another line of evidence is that, when 'liking' versus 'wanting' are teased apart by brain manipulations, specific manipulation of dopamine signaling either up or down simply fail to shift 'liking' reactions to pleasure reliably in either animals or humans (Berridge 2007;Brauer and De Wit 1997;Cannon and Palmiter 2003;Evans et al 2006;Leyton 2008;Leyton et al 2002;Leyton et al 2005;Peciña et al 2003;Robinson et al 2005;Tindell et al 2005;Volkow et al 2002;Volkow et al 2006). A third line of evidence is that dopamine systems may also be activated by aversive or frankly non-rewarding stimuli, at least tonic dopamine release pulses that last on the order of a few minutes (Ferrari et al 2003;Horvitz 2000;Salamone 1994;Scott et al 2006). Overall, the mesolimbic dopamine system often seems surprisingly unable to alter basic hedonic reactions to pleasure directly, in contrast to opioid and other true brain hedonic hotspots that generate 'liking' (Berridge 2007).…”

A New Scenario for Negative Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Signals: Endogenous Neurotransmission

“…We hypothesized that endogenous dopaminergic neurotransmission can lead to these confounding effects since the dopamine D 2 receptor (D2DR) has been proposed as being involved in regulating both pain behaviors (Magnusson and Fisher, 2000;Mansikka et al, 2005) and vascular responses (Choi et al, 2006). It has also been suggested that D2DR availability is positively correlated with the response to pain in both healthy subjects Scott et al, 2006) and patients with chronic pain syndrome . Consequently, both understanding the complex regulation of the vascular activity by endogenous dopaminergic neurotransmission and clinical investigations of pain modulation require a better understanding of underlying fMRI signals.…”

DATby perceived MC interaction on human prefrontal activity and connectivity during emotion processing

“…Genotypes displayed Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium ( 2 ¼ 0.7, P ¼ 0.4). Because of the relatively small number of 9-repeat homozygous subjects and consistent with earlier studies as well as with the known distribution of these two alleles in the population (Szekeres et al, 2004;Bertolino et al, 2006;Gilbert et al, 2006;Scott et al, 2006;Laucht et al, 2007;Bertolino et al, 2008;Bertolino et al, 2009), we grouped all subjects carrying at least one 9-repeat allele (9-repeat carriers9-car, N ¼ 37) for further analyses.…”