Investigating Pain Processing in the Brain, Brainstem, and Spinal Cord With fMRI

The experimental design is an observational (non-interventional) cross-sectional clinical study. The principal goal of the proposed research is to utilize functional magnetic resonance imaging to further investigate and characterize pain-related neural activity at the level of the brain, brainstem, and spinal cord in healthy subjects and chronic neck pain patients. Healthy subjects and chronic neck pain patients will be recruited and participate in a single session of data collection. For both the healthy and chronic neck pain groups, painful thermal stimuli will be applied over the skin of the upper extremity while whole brain, brainstem, and cervical spinal cord functional images are acquired (on separate scans). For the chronic neck pain group, additional scans (brain, brainstem, and cervical spinal cord) will be acquired while the subjects rate their spontaneous chronic neck pain.