Completed Brain & Nervous System NIHR-supported project Mental Health

Impact of tonic pain on neural correlates of sustained attention and threat sensitivity

Funder NIHR (part of DHSC)
Recipient organisation NIHR Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre
NIHR support Recorded as supported by this research centre
Period Jan 2025 — Sept 2025

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

People with fibromyalgia often report “brain-fog”—a haziness of attention and concentration that can be as disabling as the pain itself. This project asks whether the pain itself is the direct cause of those attention deficits, or whether other features of the disease are responsible. The researchers will give healthy volunteers a mild, sustained pain stimulus and scan their brains with functional MRI while they perform attention tasks. By comparing these scans with existing data from fibromyalgia patients, the team can see whether pain alone produces the same disruptions in brain connectivity that patients show. If it does, that would point to pain as a key driver of cognitive fog, not a secondary symptom. That matters because it would reframe treatment priorities: instead of treating attention problems separately, clinicians might focus on better pain management to improve cognitive function. This is fundamental science—it will not change clinical practice overnight—but understanding the neural mechanism could eventually lead to more targeted therapies for the millions of people whose daily lives are clouded by chronic pain and its cognitive toll.

View original technical description
Fibromyalgia, a chronic pain condition, is often accompanied by “brain-fog”, a debilitating symptom characterised by impaired attention and concentration. Our recent study showed significant attention deficits in fibromyalgia patients, with pain intensity strongly linked to task performance. In another recent study in pain-free adults, we demonstrated that tonic pain is associated with worse performance on a virtual-reality attention task. However, the neural mechanisms of these deficits remain unclear, and it is unknown whether they are directly related to pain or other disease aspects. We hypothesise that tonic pain in healthy individuals will produce similar functional connectivity disruptions as fibromyalgia patients, suggesting pain as a key driver of attention deficits. We will investigate how tonic pain affects functional connectivity during two sustained attention tasks in healthy volunteers using functional neuroimaging. Fourteen participants will undergo 3T-MRI, performing two established attention tasks and a resting-state fMRI protocol. We will collect demographics, mood, and cognitive symptoms data. This study builds on our previous work, allowing us to compare results with our existing patient and healthy volunteer data.

Researchers

Ben Seymour (Principal Investigator)

Related Research

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An investigation of multisensory body representation in fibromyalgia and testing a possible intervention
Stratifying Chronic Pain Patients By Pathological Mechanism- A Multimodal Investigation Using Functional MRI, Psychometric And Clinical Assessment
Viscero-sensory processes and neural responses to inflammation: mechanisms of pain and fatigue in fibromyalgia

Original classification

Brain Technologies

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