Implication and perspectives
pain
CHRONIC PAIN
Because the mechanisms underlying learning from pain and pain relief and their recursive influence on pain perception may contribute to the development and maintenance of chronic pain, it is crucial to better understand the roles of dopamine and endogenous opioids in these mechanisms. Accordingly, bidirectional manipulations of both transmitter systems should be used in future studies to better characterize their respective roles in shaping behavior and perception.The data may have clinical implications. Reward learning has recently been shown to play a role in the transition of acute to chronic pain with a specific pattern of Nucleus accumbens activity in response to a cue predicting pain relief being predictive for chronification (In summary, our study shows that dopamine has a core role in pain relief information processing, by which it modulates the way in which information tunes the modulation of pain to meet motivational demands.