Busy behind the scenes – somatoform pain leads to higher temporal activity within a fronto-insular network

Chronic pain at one or more sites without sufficiently explanatory organic pathology can be conceptualized as somatoform pain disorder. An important pathophysiological model of this psychosomatic disease is a disturbed emotional regulation which is reflected by functional and structural alterations in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the insula. The strong spatial and temporal coherence of the spontaneous neural activity within these regions during a resting state recently led to the assumption of a fronto-insular network (FIN) dedicated to interoception and personal salience. To investigate putative chan…