British journal of clinical pharmacology
-
Br J Clin Pharmacol · Jun 2015
Randomized Controlled TrialSingle-sweep spectral analysis of contact heat evoked potentials: a novel approach to identify altered cortical processing after morphine treatment.
The cortical response to nociceptive thermal stimuli recorded as contact heat evoked potentials (CHEPs) may be altered by morphine. However, previous studies have averaged CHEPs over multiple stimuli, which are confounded by jitter between sweeps. Thus, the aim was to assess single-sweep characteristics to identify alterations induced by morphine. ⋯ The decreases in the delta and theta band are suggested to represent a decrease in the pain specific morphology of the CHEPs, which indicates a diminished pain response after morphine administration. Hence, assessment of spectral indices in single-sweep CHEPs can be used to study cortical mechanisms induced by morphine treatment.