Pathophysiology of visceral pain

Abstract

The psychophysiology of visceral pain is--different from cardiac psychophysiology--much less well investigated due to the invasiveness of its methods and problems associated with reliably and reproducibly stimulating as well as recording of the gastrointestinal tract. Despite these problems, the last 30 years have documented a number of psychophysiological phenomena such as the perception (interoception) of visceral stimuli, the effect of emotions and stress on visceral sensations, and the effect of visceral processes on cortical processing. This was mainly due to the application of neurophysiological techniques (cortical imaging and stimulation) in these investigations.