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The purpose of the study is to use functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to help us understand what parts of the subject's brain are involved when he experiences visceral pain, or pain in the gut. To stimulate the brain, he will be infused with a liquid meal (Ensure) into his stomach until he is maximally full. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a technique for making images (pictures) of the brain; it uses magnetic fields and radio waves and is not harmful. This study uses a new investigational technique called functional MRI (fMRI), which is a very fast MRI technique that will allow the investigators to evaluate changes in how blood flows to parts of his brain.
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Dyspepsia, a condition characterized by upper abdominal discomfort, is one of the most common types of pains in clinical practice and is one of the most common reasons for visits to primary care physicians and gastroenterologists. But relative to somatic pain, little fundamental information is known about visceral pain syndromes such as dyspepsia and irritable bowel syndrome. Recent exciting advances in neuroimaging such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have allowed investigators to interrogate neural signal changes in humans in a wide variety of pain conditions. But to date neuroimaging has not provided details of activation in specific neural circuits that are important in visceral pain. In these experiments we will focus on specific regions of interest (ROI's) that have shown to be relevant in animal models of pain circuitry including the dorsal column nuclei, the thalamus, the hypothalamus, the amygdala and the periaqueductal gray.
The specific aims of our proposed project are:
In all these experiments we will correlate alterations in psychophysical measures which have traditional measures of pain response (e.g., pain and other hedonic ratings, physiological monitoring such as heart rate, etc) with the changes in fMRI signal in specific areas of the brain.
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