fMRI: Answering the Questions that we don’t know, and correcting the answers that we thought we knew

           Medical technology is constantly advancing which leaves the door open for us to uncover the endless amount of medical discoveries that are out there. Research involving brain mapping and neural activities through the use of fMRI is helping researchers get a more detailed depiction of what is happening inside our brains which in turn will lead to better patient care.

Dr. Elizabeth Wakefield recently spoke at our seminar class about research that she has been working on involving the use of fMRIs and testing whether children essentially learn better by simply observing an action being done or whether they learn better by observing the action and then doing the action themselves. Results showed that there is higher motor cortex activation when the actions are self-generated showing evidence that learning through self-generated actions could prove to be a more beneficial way of learning in young developing brains in children. It’s information like this that helps lead to certain reforms that will benefit society. In the case of Dr. Wakefield’s research, this evidence may lead to improved methods of teaching in schools for children that may possibly result in an increased rate of educational advancement among children.

Like I mentioned earlier, advancement in medical technology is helping us make new discoveries, and some of these discoveries are things that we once thought were correct in the past but are no longer the case given the new types of evidence presented. This is currently the case in how doctors once believed infants perceived pain. The notion in the past was that infants perceived pain differently than older children and adults meaning that they received different clinical care for pain. Most infants that underwent surgical procedures or infants that were in the intensive care unit received no proper pain management. Instead, the methods of pain management consisted of cuddling and feeding which in itself only relieved the infant of distress but did nothing in terms of any physiological relief, meaning the pain was still present.

Dr. Sezgi Goksan and his partners have conducted research that has helped discover that infants and adults perceive pain in an almost identical fashion. The experiment they did consisted of acute noxious stimulation to both the infant and adults at a range from 32mN to 512mN. The participants underwent an fMRI during the acute noxious stimulation which recorded the changes in blood oxygen level dependent activity in the brain. The results showed that activity was recorded in 18 out of 20 active adult brain regions. The two regions that were inactive in the infant brain were the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex. What this means is that there are some differences in perception of pain in infants that vary from adults but there is still strong evidence in the data confirming that infants are indeed processing the pain as an adult would. Given these results, Dr. Goksans hypothesis is supported and we should see changes in clinical pain management in infants.

These research studies are just a small example of how fMRI and overall the advancement in medical technology is helping us get a better understanding of what is going on inside our bodies so that way we can provide our patients that proper care they need.

ARTICLE: https://elifesciences.org/articles/06356