Evidence against pain specificity in the dorsal posterior insula

Authors

Karen D. Davis, University of Toronto
M. Catherine Bushnell, National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH)
Gian Domenico Iannetti, University College London
Keith St. Lawrence, Lawson Health Research InstituteFollow
Robert Coghill, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center

Document Type

Letter to the Editor

Publication Date

7-24-2015

Journal

F1000Research

Volume

4

URL with Digital Object Identifier

10.12688/f1000research.6833.1

Abstract

The search for a "pain centre" in the brain has long eluded neuroscientists. Although many regions of the brain have been shown to respond to painful stimuli, all of these regions also respond to other types of salient stimuli. In a recent paper, Segerdahl et al. (Nature Neuroscience, 2015) claims that the dorsal posterior insula (dpIns) is a pain-specific region based on the observation that the magnitude of regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) fluctuations in the dpIns correlated with the magnitude of evoked pain. However, such a conclusion is, simply, not justified by the experimental evidence provided. Here we discuss three major factors that seriously question this claim.