Influence of Propranolol on Conditioned Pain Modulation
Status:
Completed
Trial end date:
2017-01-01
Target enrollment:
Participant gender:
Summary
An extensive amount of studies indicate that conditioned pain modulation (CPM) test paradigms
can be of use to evaluate the efficacy of the endogenous pain inhibition pathway in healthy
controls and pain patients. A number of studies indicate that the autonomic nervous system
(ANS) responds to painful stimulation by parasympathetic activity withdrawal and
up-regulation of sympathetic activity (flight-or-fight mode), but it remains unknown whether
these responses predict individual pain susceptibility or CPM efficacy and whether different
pain modalities evoke different physiological stress responses, i.e. do individuals with low
pain tolerance exhibit more vigorous ANS responses when subjected to controlled acute pain
stimuli, and do high ANS responsiveness to pain coincide with altered psychophysical pain
levels/CPM efficacy.
This study aims to investigate the effect of ANS responsiveness on CPM paradigms and to
investigate if an exogenous, pharmaceutically induced decrease in the sympathetic drive of
the ANS will yield decreased CPM efficacy.