| Summary: | 博士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 生命科學系 === 107 === Pain alerts humans and animals from danger and injury, also it protects us until the injured tissue heal. However, pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience. Although numerous studies have been performed to delineate pain mechanism using functional brain imaging, there were still some discrepant results in the brain signature for pain has not been solved.
The purpose of this dissertation is to provide the clue of brain processing in pain perception and analgesia using FDG-PET imaging. The first part is observing different
neuropathic pain behaviors and treatment response in rats. In the second series of studies, we used FDG-PET to identify the activated brain areas of neuropathic pain rats in different neuropathic pain behaviors. Furthermore, we tested the treatment response of these brain areas to pregabalin. In the third study, we identified the activated brain area in cancer pain mice and morphine analgesia. Finally, we retrospectively analyzed brain
FDG-PET in cancer pain patients. In these human and rodent studies, we found one consistently activated brain area－i.e., the insular cortex. We propose that insular cortex
maybe one of the most important pain related areas in both human and rodents.
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