Women exhibit greater habituation to painful stimuli than men. The neural mechanism underlying this sex difference is unknown. However, pain habituation has been associated with pain-evoked activity of the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC), implicating a connection between the sgACC and the descending pain antinociceptive system. Therefore, the thesis hypothesis was that women have stronger connectivity than men between the sgACC and the descending antinociceptive system. Healthy subjects provided informed consent. 3T MRI images included anatomical diffusion-weighted imaging for structural connectivity analyses (SC) with probabilistic tractography and resting-state functional images for functional connectivity (FC) analyses. Women had stronger sgACC FC with nodes of the descending pain modulation system (raphe, PAG) and the medial thalamus. In contrast, men had stronger sgACC FC with nodes of the salience/attention network (anterior insula, TPJ) and stronger sgACC SC with the hypothalamus. These findings implicate a mechanism for pain habituation and its associated sex differences.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/43328 |
| Date | 11 December 2013 |
| Creators | Wang, Gang |
| Contributors | Davis, Karen |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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