Subjective pain perception, spinal nociception and descending inhibition of experimentally induced pain in Parkinson's disease

Patients suffering from Parkinson's disease (PD) complain more often about acute and chronic pain, which can be subdivided into musculoskeletal pain, radicular-neuropathic pain, dystonic pain, central pain and akathisia. Previous studies of experimentally induced pain in PD revealed heterogeneous results. One recent study detected an increased perception of heat-induced pain, which was reversible after dopaminergic treatment. Possibly a reduced dopaminergic descending inhibitory control (DNIC) system contributes to this finding. Therefore, we investigated the DNIC system by using a tonic heat stimulus and a phas…