In patients who experience unilateral chronic pain, abnormal sensory perception at the non-painful side has been reported. Contralateral sensory changes in these patients have been given little attention, possibly because they are regarded as clinically irrelevant. Still, bilateral sensory changes in these patients could become clinically relevant if they challenge the correct identification of...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the reproducibility of thermal thresholds, as measured by repeated quantitative sensory testing (QST) in healthy controls, and to asses if temperature sensitivity differs between healthy controls and a cohort of patients with persistent pain. SUBJECTS A total of 54 healthy controls were compared with 25 consecutive patients selected for pain rehabilitation by multidis...

Diabetic neuropathy is associated with increased morbidity and mortality. To date, limited data in subjects with impaired glucose tolerance and diabetes demonstrate nerve fiber repair after intervention. This may reflect a lack of efficacy of the interventions but may also reflect difficulty of the tests currently deployed to adequately assess nerve fiber repair, particularly in short-term stud...

Our preliminary observations on a small group of burning mouth syndrome (BMS) patients indicated a change in the non-nociceptive, tactile sensory function in BMS and provided evidence for the hypothesis of a neuropathic etiology of BMS. In the present clinical study on a group of 52 BMS patients, we used quantitative sensory tests (QST) in addition to the blink reflex (BR) recordings in order t...

To investigate the usefulness of pain-related evoked potentials (PREP) elicited by electrical stimulation for the identification of small fiber involvement in patients with mixed fiber neuropathy (MFN). Eleven MFN patients with clinical signs of large fiber impairment and neuropathic pain and ten healthy controls underwent clinical and electrophysiological evaluation. Small fiber function, elec...

OBJECTIVE To investigate whether somatosensory impairments are more common in individuals with post-stroke shoulder pain than in those without post-stroke shoulder pain and healthy controls. DESIGN Descriptive analysis of a convenience sample. PARTICIPANTS Forty-nine individuals with stroke, 24 with and 25 without post-stroke shoulder pain (median age 65 years), and 11 age- and sex-matched ...

OBJECTIVES Spinal cord stimulation (SCS) is increasingly used to treat various chronic pain conditions. One undetermined issue is to what extent SCS alters the processing of sensory information from the periphery, including those stimuli that are mediated by small-fiber populations. We aimed to investigate these possible changes using quantitative sensory testing (QST). METHODS Fourteen patie...

This article reports a relaxation study in an oriented system containing spin 3/2 nuclei using quantum state tomography (QST). The use of QST allowed evaluating the time evolution of all density matrix elements starting from several initial states. Using an appropriated treatment based on the Redfield theory, the relaxation rate of each density matrix element was measured and the reduced spectr...