Reference fields in phantom tooth pain as a marker for remapping in the facial territory.

Six patients with chronic phantom tooth pain were studied for the presence of reference fields for their phantom sensation. In five of them, pain or dysesthesia in the affected oral structures was elicited by thermal or mechanical stimulation of areas that were well separate from these structures. However, a relation of topographical proximity between the stimulated areas and the areas of reference could be traced in the sensory maps. Therefore, denervation of small structures with coarse sensitivity can yield the plastic changes that have previously been described for larger deafferentations of areas endowed with finer discriminative capacity.