First-in-human prediction of chronic pain state using intracranial neural biomarkers 2023, Shirvalkar et al

Abstract
Chronic pain syndromes are often refractory to treatment and cause substantial suffering and disability. Pain severity is often measured through subjective report, while objective biomarkers that may guide diagnosis and treatment are lacking. Also, which brain activity underlies chronic pain on clinically relevant timescales, or how this relates to acute pain, remains unclear. Here four individuals with refractory neuropathic pain were implanted with chronic intracranial electrodes in the anterior cingulate cortex and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). Participants reported pain metrics coincident with ambulatory, direct neural recordings obtained multiple times daily over months. We successfully predicted intraindividual chronic pain severity scores from neural activity with high sensitivity using machine learning methods. Chronic pain decoding relied on sustained power changes from the OFC, which tended to differ from transient patterns of activity associated with acute, evoked pain states during a task. Thus, intracranial OFC signals can be used to predict spontaneous, chronic pain state in patients.

paywalled
First-in-human prediction of chronic pain state using intracranial neural biomarkers | Nature Neuroscience

Open access from Nature newsletter link https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-023-01338-z.epdf?sharing_token=-Osl9tu9hsndRjiSD6l9KtRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0MxdbojJ6tBM6fd9CbRkrdicXmlSz__nOl9GDFyXDd9ltrflXAw2iFb9RQ_5xYnLRnN_2Xvyt6E8WglzAqxrehhF4nNM4hDKvuOAqizlbqpTOXoAsmIRM0My16C7wGt9Ow=

 

article
Scientists discover brain signals for chronic pain
Discovery of ‘objective biomarker’ raises hopes for new treatments for people living with intractable pain

Scientists discover brain signals for chronic pain | Health | The Guardian

 

If you can achieve this noninvasively, like with neuroimaging, then now you're talking. There's also EEGs, but they don't measure much from deep inside the brain.

 

Merged
NIH Director's blog: Brain signatures for chronic pain identified in a small group of individuals

"For the first time, researchers have recorded pain-related data from inside the brain of individuals with chronic pain disorders caused by stroke or amputation (phantom limb pain). A long sought-after goal has been to understand how pain is represented by brain activity and how to modulate that activity to relieve suffering from chronic pain. Data were collected over months while patients were at home, and they were analyzed using machine learning tools. Doing so, the researchers identified an area of the brain associated with chronic pain and objective biomarkers of chronic pain in individual patients.

These findings, which represent a first step towards developing novel methods for tracking and treating chronic pain, were published in Nature Neuroscience and funded by the National Institutes of Health’s Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative and the Helping to End Addiction Long-term Initiative, or NIH HEAL Initiative."

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/new...ronic-pain-identified-small-group-individuals

 

For those with access to ResearchGate, the pdf of the paper is posted there.

https://www.researchgate.net/public...in_state_using_intracranial_neural_biomarkers