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. 2022 Jul 6;3(7):100677. doi: 10.1016/j.xcrm.2022.100677

Figure 2.

Figure 2

Fronto-striatal encoding of prediction error signal predicts the transition from subacute to chronic pain

(Left) Correlations of the percentage of change in pain severity from baseline to the 6 month follow up and the BOLD response to prediction errors in the NAc and vmPFC. The dashed vertical line indicates the 20% cutoff that was used to binarize the change in pain severity for the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves on the right side. BOLD responses were extracted as parameter estimates from predefined masks extracted from http://neurosynth.org (see STAR methods). Correlations are reported as Pearson’s correlation with Bonferroni-corrected p values (corrected for 45 tests, yielding a threshold of p < 0.001). (Right) We additionally divided patients in “recovered” if their pain severity decreased by 20% or more between the first examination and the follow-up assessment and “persistent” patients in all other instances. ROC curves were created for classifying recovered and persistent patients with the respective parameter estimates extracted from the regions of interest. We report the area under each ROC curve as an estimate of sensitivity and specificity. Associated p values for the comparison to a chance-level ROC curve (i.e., AUC = 0.5) are reported as Bonferroni-corrected p values (corrected for 45 tests, yielding a threshold of p < 0.001). Boxplots additionally show the distribution of patients who recovered (yellow) and patients with persistent pain at follow up (blue). The hinges of the boxplots represent the first and third quartiles, and the whiskers extend to the last value within 1.5 times the interquartile range. Single data points are shown as circles. Outliers are depicted as empty circles and imputed values as triangles. See Tables S4 and S5 for all other associations between reward-learning contrasts and change in pain severity. vmPFC, ventromedial prefrontal cortex; lNAc, left nucleus accumbens; rNAc, right nucleus accumbens; PPE, positive prediction error; NPE, negative prediction error; BL, baseline; FU, follow up; AUC, area under the curve; SABP, patients with subacute back pain; SABPp/r, patients with SABP with persistent pain or recovered pain after 6 months, based on a pain reduction of 20% from baseline to the follow-up assessment.