{"doi":"10.1016/j.jpain.2023.07.012","title":"Painful Cutaneous Laser Stimulation for Temporal Summation of Pain Assessment","abstract":"•Temporal summation of pain can be reliably evoked by repetitive laser stimulations.•Temporal summation of pain is greater in healthy female than male subjects.•Temporal summation of pain is accompanied by time-frequency EEG responses. Variability in pain sensitivity arises not only from the differences in peripheral sensory receptors, but also from the differences in central nervous system pain inhibition and facilitation mechanisms. Temporal summation of pain (TSP) is an experimental protocol commonly used in human studies of pain facilitation but is susceptible to confounding when elicited with the skin-contact thermode, which adds the responses of touch-related Aβ low-threshold mechanoreceptors (LTMR) to nociceptive receptors. In the present study, we evaluate an alternative method involving with the use contactless cutaneous laser for TSP assessment. We show that repetitive laser stimulations, 1-second inter-stimulus interval, evoked reliable TSP responses in a significant proportion of healthy subjects (N = 36). Female (N = 18) reported greater TSP responses than male subjects confirming earlier studies of sex differences in central nociceptive excitability. Furthermore, repetitive laser stimulations during TSP induction induced increased time-frequency EEG responses. The present study demonstrates that repetitive laser stimulation may be an alternative to skin-contact methods for TSP assessment in patients and healthy controls.PERSPECTIVETemporal summation of pain (TSP) is an experimental protocol commonly used in human studies of pain facilitation. We show that the contactless cutaneous laser stimulation is a reliable alternative to the skin contact approaches for evoking more pain-related neural responses during TSP assessment. Variability in pain sensitivity arises not only from the differences in peripheral sensory receptors, but also from the differences in central nervous system pain inhibition and facilitation mechanisms. Temporal summation of pain (TSP) is an experimental protocol commonly used in human studies of pain facilitation but is susceptible to confounding when elicited with the skin-contact thermode, which adds the responses of touch-related Aβ low-threshold mechanoreceptors (LTMR) to nociceptive receptors. In the present study, we evaluate an alternative method involving with the use contactless cutaneous laser for TSP assessment. We show that repetitive laser stimulations, 1-second inter-stimulus interval, evoked reliable TSP responses in a significant proportion of healthy subjects (N = 36). Female (N = 18) reported greater TSP responses than male subjects confirming earlier studies of sex differences in central nociceptive excitability. Furthermore, repetitive laser stimulations during TSP induction induced increased time-frequency EEG responses. The present study demonstrates that repetitive laser stimulation may be an alternative to skin-contact methods for TSP assessment in patients and healthy controls. Temporal summation of pain (TSP) is an experimental protocol commonly used in human studies of pain facilitation. We show that the contactless cutaneous laser stimulation is a reliable alternative to the skin contact approaches for evoking more pain-related neural responses during TSP assessment.","journal":"Journal of Pain","year":2023,"id":367176,"datarank":0.26876392038420827,"base_score":1.791759469228055,"endowment":1.791759469228055,"self_citation_contribution":0.26876392038420827,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.26876392038420827,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":5,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.955,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1084440,"name":"Shayan Moosa","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1124336,"name":"Mariam Ishaque","orcid":"0000-0002-9488-936X","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":492539,"name":"Patrick H. Finan","orcid":"0000-0002-7525-4801","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":737422,"name":"Mark Quigg","orcid":"0000-0003-3035-9260","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1124787,"name":"W. Jeffrey Elias","orcid":null,"position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1124337,"name":"Chang‐Chia Liu","orcid":"0000-0003-1173-6817","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":417758,"name":"Dan Wang","orcid":"0000-0003-3421-697X","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":85,"raw_metadata":{"citation_network_status":"fetched"},"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:15:12.215513Z","pmid":"37468022","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}