{"doi":"10.1101/2021.11.12.468345","title":"Structural brain connectivity predicts acute pain after mild traumatic brain injury","abstract":"Abstract Mild traumatic brain injury, mTBI, is a leading cause of disability worldwide, with acute pain manifesting as one of its most debilitating symptoms. Understanding acute post-injury pain is important since it is a strong predictor of long-term outcomes. In this study, we imaged the brains of 172 patients with mTBI, following a motorized vehicle collision and used a machine learning approach to extract white matter structural and resting state fMRI functional connectivity measures to predict acute pain. Stronger white matter tracts within the sensorimotor, thalamic-cortical, and default-mode systems predicted 20% of the variance in pain severity within 72 hours of the injury. This result generalized in two independent groups: 39 mTBI patients and 13 mTBI patients without whiplash symptoms. White matter measures collected at 6-months after the collision still predicted mTBI pain at that timepoint (n = 36). These white-matter connections were associated with two nociceptive psychophysical outcomes tested at a remote body site – namely conditioned pain modulation and magnitude of suprathreshold pain–, and with pain sensitivity questionnaire scores. Our validated findings demonstrate a stable white-matter network, the properties of which determine a significant amount of pain experienced after acute injury, pinpointing a circuitry engaged in the transformation and amplification of nociceptive inputs to pain perception.","journal":"bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)","year":2021,"id":227586,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9615,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":831891,"name":"Noam Bosak","orcid":"0000-0002-6289-7023","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":526816,"name":"Jannis Bielefeld","orcid":"0000-0002-9919-9616","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":831892,"name":"Olivia Cong","orcid":"0000-0003-0962-0698","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":831893,"name":"Yelena Granovsky","orcid":"0009-0005-4466-6626","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":503456,"name":"Itamar Kahn","orcid":"0000-0002-1895-8677","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":831894,"name":"David Yarnitsky","orcid":"0000-0002-2293-2090","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":441694,"name":"A. Vania Apkarian","orcid":"0000-0002-9788-7458","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":646376,"name":"Paulo Branco","orcid":"0000-0002-9425-046X","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":67,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:54:46.312854Z","pmid":null,"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":[]}