Abstract
In 1891, Ludwig Edinger, a German professor of neurology and founder of modern comparative neuroanatomy (see biography in [1]), challenging the prevailing opinion of the day, introduced the concept of centrally arising pains. The patient was Frau R. (Mrs. R.), aged 48, who developed heftige Schmerzen und deutliche Hyperaesthesie in den gelaehmten Gliedern (violent pains and clear-cut hyperesthesia in the paretic limbs: right arm and leg), Wegen der furchtbaren Schmerzen Suicidium 1888 (due to the terrible pains, suicide 1888). She was morphium (opioid) unresponsive. At autopsy, a thalamic infarction was found. In 1895, Wallenberg described facial pains following medullary stroke. In the first decade of the twentieth century, French neurologists Dejerine and Roussy introduced the concept of the syndrome thalamique which at times also included spontaneous pain. In 1911, Head and Holmes concluded that thalamic pain depends on the destruction of the posterior part of the external thalamic nucleus and provided the first—and still unparalleled—quantitative description of the associated somatosensory alterations. During World War I, several observations on “thalamic pains” following spinal cord war lesions were published, as previously done—but only descriptively—during the US Civil War in the 1860s. The term central pain (CP) was first used in the English literature by Behan in 1914. By the early 1930s, it was clear that lesions at any level of the CNS could be accompanied by CP. Despite these observations, the term thalamic syndrome became synonymous with CP. In 1969 Cassinari and Pagni, by studying iatrogenic “pure” lesions giving rise to CP, reached the conclusion that the essential lesion was damage to the pain-conveying spinothalamoparietal tract. Also, they observed how operations that interrupt the pain-relaying pathways in order to allay pain may themselves originate CP (sometimes more severe than the pain that led to the operation). The genesis of CP was finally revealed in 1994 by Canavero, Pagni’s pupil (Fig. 1.1; see [2] for complete historical survey).
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Prithishkumar IJ. Ludwig Edinger (1855–1918): founder of modern neuroanatomy. Clin Anat. 2012;25(2):155–7.
Canavero S, Bonicalzi V. Central pain Syndrome: pathophysiology, diagnosis and management. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2011.
Cragg JJ, Noonan VK, Noreau L, Borisoff JF, Kramer JK. Neuropathic pain, depression, and cardiovascular disease: a national multicenter study. Neuroepidemiology. 2015;44(3):130–7.
Fayaz A, Watt HC, Langford RM, Donaldson LJ. The association between chronic pain and cardiac disease: a cross-sectional population study. Clin J Pain. 2016;32:1062–8.
Margolis JM, Juneau P, Sadosky A, Cappelleri JC, Bryce TN, Nieshoff EC. Health care resource utilization and medical costs of spinal cord injury with neuropathic pain in a commercially insured population in the United States. Arch Phys Med Rehabil. 2014;95(12):2279–87.
Margolis JM, Juneau P, Sadosky A, Cappelleri JC, Bryce TN, Nieshoff EC. Health care utilization and expenditures among Medicaid beneficiaries with neuropathic pain following spinal cord injury. J Pain Res. 2014;7:379–87.
Schaefer C, Mann R, Sadosky A, Daniel S, Parsons B, Nieshoff E, Tuchman M, Nalamachu S, Anschel A, Stacey BR. Burden of illness associated with peripheral and central neuropathic pain among adults seeking treatment in the United States: a patient-centered evaluation. Pain Med. 2014;15(12):2105–19.
Finnerup NB, Norrbrink C, Trok K, Piehl F, Johannesen IL, Sørensen JC, Jensen TS, Werhagen L. Phenotypes and predictors of pain following traumatic spinal cord injury: a prospective study. J Pain. 2014;15(1):40–8.
Qing HS, Shuhui G, Jiagang L. Surgical management of intramedullary cavernous angiomas and analysis pain relief. Neurol India. 2014;62(4):423–8.
Zeilig G, Enosh S, Rubin-Asher D, Lehr B, Defrin R. The nature and course of sensory changes following spinal cord injury: predictive properties and implications on the mechanism of central pain. Brain. 2012;135(Pt 2):418–30.
Klit H, Hansen AP, Marcussen NS, Finnerup NB, Jensen TS. Early evoked pain or dysesthesia is a predictor of central poststroke pain. Pain. 2014;155(12):2699–706.
Levitan Y, Zeilig G, Bondi M, Ringler E, Defrin R. Predicting the risk for central pain using the sensory components of the international standards for neurological classification of spinal cord injury. J Neurotrauma. 2015;32(21):1684–92.
Sprenger T, Seifert CL, Valet M, Andreou AP, Foerschler A, Zimmer C, Collins DL, Goadsby PJ, Tölle TR, Chakravarty MM. Assessing the risk of central post-stroke pain of thalamic origin by lesion mapping. Brain. 2012;135(Pt 8):2536–45.
Vartiainen N, Perchet C, Magnin M, Creac’h C, Convers P, Nighoghossian N, Mauguière F, Peyron R, Garcia-Larrea L. Thalamic pain: anatomical and physiological indices of prediction. Brain. 2016;139(Pt 3):708–22.
Vachon-Presseau E, Tétreault P, Petre B, Huang L, Berger SE, Torbey S, Baria AT, Mansour AR, Hashmi JA, Griffith JW, Comasco E, Schnitzer TJ, Baliki MN, Apkarian AV. Corticolimbic anatomical characteristics predetermine risk for chronic pain. Brain. 2016;139(Pt 7):1958–70.
Cragg JJ, Haefeli J, Jutzeler CR, Röhrich F, Weidner N, Saur M, Maier DD, Kalke YB, Schuld C, Curt A, Kramer JK. Effects of pain and pain management on motor recovery of spinal cord-injured patients: a longitudinal study. Neurorehabil Neural Repair. 2016;30(8):753–61.
Vuckovic A, Hasan MA, Osuagwu B, Fraser M, Allan DB, Conway BA, Nasseroleslami B. The influence of central neuropathic pain in paraplegic patients on performance of a motor imagery based brain computer interface. Clin Neurophysiol. 2015;126(11):2170–80.
Lampl C, Yazdi K, Röper C. Amitriptyline in the prophylaxis of central poststroke pain. Preliminary results of 39 patients in a placebo-controlled, long-term study. Stroke. 2002;33(12):3030–2.
Salinas FA, Lugo LH, Garcıa HI. Efficacy of early treatment with carbamazepine in prevention of neuropathic pain in patients with spinal cord injury. Am J Phys Med Rehabil. 2012;91:1020–7.
Descalzi G, Ikegami D, Ushijima T, Nestler EJ, Zachariou V, Narita M. Epigenetic mechanisms of chronic pain. Trends Neurosci. 2015;38(4):237–46.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Canavero, S., Bonicalzi, V. (2018). Introduction. In: Central Pain Syndrome. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56765-5_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56765-5_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-56764-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-56765-5
eBook Packages: MedicineMedicine (R0)