Pain outside the body: defensive peripersonal space deformation in trigeminal neuralgia

pain lateralization in trigeminal neuralgia

A geometric model of defensive peripersonal space

Potentially harmful stimuli occurring within the defensive peripersonal space (DPPS), a protective area surrounding the body, elicit stronger defensive reactions. The spatial features of the DPPS are poorly defined and limited to descriptive estimates of its extent along a single dimension. Here we postulated a family of geometric models of the DPPS, to address two important questions with resp...

Pain Lateralization in Trigeminal Neuralgia

I read the article by Bangash (1) with great interest, as it reconfirms the repeatedly reported finding of the predominance of affection of the right side of the face in patients with trigeminal neuralgia. This finding is even more intriguing as trigeminal neuralgia behaves quite opposite to many other painful disorders as pain in general was assumed to be more common on the left side of the bo...

Pain Part 7: Trigeminal Neuralgia

Trigeminal neuralgia (TN) is also known as ‘tic douloureux’ (in French, ‘painful twitch’). It is a rare chronic facial pain syndrome, characterized by severe, brief, stabbing, ‘electric shock-like’ recurrent pain attacks felt in one or more divisions of trigeminal nerve innervation areas. So intense is the elicited pain that TN has a significant effect on a sufferer’s quality of life, rendering...

Gravitational cues modulate the shape of defensive peripersonal space

The potential damage caused by an environmental threat increases with proximity to the body, so animals perform more effective and stronger defensive responses when threatening stimuli occur nearby the body, in a region termed the defensive peripersonal space (DPPS) [1,2]. We recently characterized the fine-grained geometry of the face's DPPS by recording the enhancement of the blink reflex eli...