Clinical neurophysiology : official journal of the International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology
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Randomized Controlled Trial
The effect of sleep restriction on laser evoked potentials, thermal sensory and pain thresholds and suprathreshold pain in healthy subjects.
Sleep restriction seems to change our experience of pain and reduce laser evoked potential (LEP) amplitudes. However, although LEP-habituation abnormalities have been described in painful conditions with comorbid sleep impairment, no study has previously measured the effect of sleep restriction on LEP-habituation, pain thresholds, and suprathreshold pain. ⋯ Since LEP-amplitude is known to reflect both CNS-pain-specific processing and cognitive attentive processing, our results suggest that hyperalgesia after sleep restriction might partly be caused by a reduction in cortical cognitive or perceptual mechanisms, rather than sensory amplification.