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Intensive and Temporal Determinants of Thermal Pain

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Sensory Functions of the Skin of Humans

Abstract

The search for peripheral neural determinants of pain is aided by the attempt to correlate measurements of pain sensation with neural activity in peripheral afferent nerve fibers. Those fibers that respond only to noxious stimulation of their receptive fields are called “nociceptive afferents” and their distal endings, “nociceptors”. The word “nociceptive” is derived from the Latin word for “injury”; yet a biologically useful function of neural activity in nociceptive afferents may be to evoke pain in order to signal the threat of injury before it actually occurs (Burgess and Perl, 1973). Evidence for this comes from the close correlation between neural activity in nociceptive afferents in the peripheral nerve of conscious humans and simultaneous reports of pain during noxious stimulation of the skin (Torebjörk and Hallin, 1974; van Hees and Gybels, 1972). Heating the skin is an effective method of quantifying noxious stimulation. It is well known that the magnitude of pain, evoked by heating the skin, is determined to a large extent by the stimulus temperature. Much less is known about the temporal determinants of pain and the way is which the duration and frequency of heating interact with intensity to influence the magnitude of pain. I will describe our analyses of these variables in psychophysical studies in humans, and in studies of heat-sensitive nociceptors in the monkey.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anesthesiology, Yale University School of Medicine, 333 Cedar Street, New Haven, Connecticut, 06510, USA

    Robert H. LaMotte

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  1. Robert H. LaMotte
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, USA

    Dan R. Kenshalo

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© 1979 Plenum Press, New York

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LaMotte, R.H. (1979). Intensive and Temporal Determinants of Thermal Pain. In: Kenshalo, D.R. (eds) Sensory Functions of the Skin of Humans. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-3039-4_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-3039-4_18

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4613-3041-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4613-3039-4

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