Stability of individually unique signatures of chronic pain encoding in the human brain
Final Report Abstract
The scientific advance of the project can be immense. Group statistics are often driven by a few participants with particularly strong effects. The study suggests that there is no common processing of endogenous pain in the same group and the quest for a common biomarker for pain will ultimately fail. The study can explain the current replication crisis in neuroscience, which is in my view a sample crisis. Results of group statistics can be replicated if the sample includes participants with similar dominant activity patterns. The cortical processing appears to be more complex for our current neuroscience methods. This may also apply to other fields of neuroscience. The study has the potential to lead to more diversity and acceptance of inter-individual differences. My project shows that the differences between individuals are more qualitative than gradual (quantitative). Effects that are present in only a subset of the participants can not be explained by gradual scores, e.g. from questionnaires or physiological data. The side project, to remove muscle project, is not directly related to the actual DFG funding but supports the analysis of the EEG data. We had to develop the tool because we had the impression that the tools that are currently available are not good or accurate enough to deal with artefacts from head muscles. Head muscles are a source of confounds for the analysis of neuronal gamma oscillations and can severely impair the interpretation of the data. The source code of our tool is publicly available and will be of immense help for researchers that aim to investigate neuronal gamma oscillations. The biggest surprise is the actual amount of variation of cortical processing across participants. I was expecting some cortical “core regions” involved in pain processing that would be detected in most patients. However, this was not supported by the data. Instead, individual patterns of cortical processing appear to be qualitatively different rather than gradually (quantitatively) different.
Publications
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A Novel Tool for the Removal of Muscle Artefacts from EEG: Improving Data Quality in the Gamma Frequency Range. Journal of Neuroscience Methods (2021)
Liebisch AP, Eggert T, Shindy A, Valentini E, Irving S, Stankewitz A, Schulz E
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Intrinsic Network Activity Reflects the Ongoing Experience of Chronic Pain. Scientific reports (2021)
Jahn P, Deak B, Mayr A, Stankewitz A, Keeser D, Griffanti L, Witkovsky V, Irving S, Schulz E
