Soreness or sng: a common symptom with differential clinical impact from pain in degenerative lumbar spine diseases.

INTRODUCTION: Soreness is a common complaint in patients who receive lumbar spine surgery (LSS) for degenerative lumbar spine diseases (DLSD). However, soreness is not assessed independently and its impacts on outcomes of LSS remains largely unknown. Sng(pronounced sә-ng, ) in Chinese language is the word with the closest meaning to soreness, and Chinese-speaking people naturally use sng to describe their non-pain 'soreness' symptom. This study was aimed to investigate the prevalence and impacts of soreness or sng on outcome of LSS by introducing Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) of sng on back and leg. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This prospective cohort study recruited patients who receive LSS for DLSD. Participants completed the patient-reported outcome measures at 1 week before and 1 years after LSS. The patient-reported outcome measures included (1) VAS for back pain, leg pain, back sng and leg sng, (2) Oswestry Disability Index (ODI) and (3) RAND 36-item Short Form Health Survey. The minimal clinical important difference (MCID) of ODI and physical component health-related quality of life (HRQoL) was used. RESULTS: A total of 258 consecutive patients were included and 50 dropped out at follow-up. Preoperatively, the prevalence of sng was comparable to pain both on back and leg; postoperatively, the prevalence of sng was higher than pain. Leg and back sng were associated with preoperative and postoperative mental HRQoL, respectively. The reduction of sng on back and leg were significantly less than pain postoperatively. Leg sng was the only symptom independently associated with attaining MCID. CONCLUSION: Soreness or sng should be assessed independently from pain in patients receiving LSS for DLSD because soreness or sng had substantial clinical impacts on the outcome of LSS.

Resting heart rate variability in young women is a predictor of EEG reactions to linguistic ambiguity in sentences.

Recent research has found a relationship between heart rate variability (HRV) and cognitive control mechanisms underlying various experimental tasks. This study explored the interaction between gender and resting-state HRV in brain oscillatory activity during visual recognition of linguistic ambiguity while taking state and trait anxiety scores into account. It is well known that stress or anxiety increases arousal levels, particularly under uncertainty situations. We tasked 50 young Mandarin speakers (26 women; average age 26.00 ±â€¯4.449) with the recognition of linguistic ambiguity in English (foreign) sentences with the purpose of imposing a sense of uncertainty in decision-making. Our results revealed a dependency between resting-state HRV and theta/alpha power in individual women. Low HRV women showed stronger theta/alpha desynchronization compared with their high HRV counterparts, independent of topographic localization. However, low and high HRV men exhibited comparable theta/alpha activity. Trait anxiety scores affected alpha power in the parieto-occipital regions, whereas men with higher scores and women with lower scores showed stronger alpha desynchronization. We posit that stress-provoking situations may impose additional effects on theta/alpha desynchronization in the frontal and temporal regions, a condition in which the interdependency between brain oscillatory activity and resting-state HRV could interact with cognitive control differently in men and women.

Pain Perception Can Be Modulated by Mindfulness Training: A Resting-State fMRI Study.

The multi-dimensional nature of pain renders difficult a holistic understanding of it. The conceptual framework of pain is said to be cognitive-evaluative, in addition to being sensory-discriminative and affective-motivational. To compare participants' brain-behavior response before and after a 6-week mindfulness-based stress reduction training course on mindfulness in relation to pain modulation, three questionnaires (the Dallas Pain Questionnaire, Short Form McGill Pain Questionnaire-SFMPQ, and Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness) as well as resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging were administered to participants, divided into a pain-afflicted group (N = 18) and a control group (N = 16). Our results showed that the pain-afflicted group experienced significantly less pain after the mindfulness treatment than before, as measured by the SFMPQ. In conjunction, an increased connection from the anterior insular cortex (AIC) to the dorsal anterior midcingulate cortex (daMCC) was observed in the post-training pain-afflicted group and a significant correlation was found between AIC-daMCC connectivity and SFMPQ scores. The results suggest that mindfulness training can modulate the brain network dynamics underlying the subjective experience of pain.