Throughout life, age-related changes occur in relation to pain sensitivity. In fact, several factors, such as spontaneous neuronal fluctuations, attention, expectation of pain, cognitive and emotional states, sleep habits and stress, may influence pain perception ( Kröger, Menz, & May, 2016). Nevertheless, intraindividual differences also exist. ![]() However, it is well-known that the perception of clinical pain per se seems to vary greatly from person to person in the general population. Understanding pain is fundamental to improve the evaluation, treatment, and innovation in the management of acute and persistent pain syndromes. Dysfunction at any level has the potential to produce an unregulated, persistent pain ( Fenton, Shih, & Zolton, 2015). Several cortical regions become active simultaneously during pain perception activity in the cortical pain matrix evolves over time to produce a complex pain perception network. Pain signals arrive in the thalamus and midbrain structures that form the pain neuromatrix, a constantly shifting set of networks and connections that determine conscious perception. Pain perception begins in the periphery, and then ascends in several tracts, relaying at different levels. If the receptor’s potential is of sufficient magnitude to reach the activation threshold for voltage-dependent channels, it will trigger an action potential generation and the transmission of a pain signal to the spinal cord ( Dubin & Patapoutian, 2010 Reichling, Green, & Levine, 2013). When a noxious stimulus activates an ion channel on a nociceptor, it produces a depolarization of the nociceptor, generating an electric potential. The human body is equipped with different types of sensory neurons and nociceptors, which form the primary unit of pain, which are able to detect stimuli that have the potential to cause damage. Pain is defined as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, whereas nociception is the neural process of encoding noxious stimuli ( IASP, 2021). Vanesa Cantón-HabasJosé Manuel Martínez-MartosManuel Rich-RuizMaría Jesús Ramirez-ÉxpositoMaría del Pilar Carrera-González, in Features and Assessments of Pain, Anaesthesia, and Analgesia, 2022 Biology of pain
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