Journal of clinical neurophysiology : official publication of the American Electroencephalographic Society
-
J Clin Neurophysiol · Jun 2012
Randomized Controlled TrialAdvanced pharmaco-EEG reveals morphine induced changes in the brain's pain network.
By using a novel brain source modeling approach, where the evoked potential (EP) signal was decomposed with multichannel matching pursuit (MMP) before source localization, we investigated brain generators of EPs after a pain stimulus in the esophagus before and after administration of placebo/morphine. We showed that this new approach of pharmaco-electroencephalogram (EEG) analysis can shed light on subtle changes, which cannot be foreseen from conventional analysis (amplitude/latency/topography). ⋯ Decomposing the EPs into the original brain generators showed that morphine mainly changes the low frequency electrical activity in the frontal brain area. This method can be used to increase the basic understanding of the opioid effect on the brain's processing of pain and eventually identify biomarkers of analgesia in experimental pain models.