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Brain imaging tests for chronic pain: medical, legal and ethical issues and recommendations

Davis, KD; Flor, H; Greely, HT; Iannetti, GD; Mackey, S; Ploner, M; Pustilnik, A; ... Wager, TD; + view all (2017) Brain imaging tests for chronic pain: medical, legal and ethical issues and recommendations. Nature Reviews Neurology 10.1038/nrneurol.2017.122. (In press). Green open access

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Abstract

Chronic pain is the greatest source of disability globally and claims related to chronic pain feature in many insurance and medico-legal cases. Brain imaging (for example, functional MRI, PET, EEG and magnetoencephalography) is widely considered to have potential for diagnosis, prognostication, and prediction of treatment outcome in patients with chronic pain. In this Consensus Statement, a presidential task force of the International Association for the Study of Pain examines the capabilities of brain imaging in the diagnosis of chronic pain, and the ethical and legal implications of its use in this way. The task force emphasizes that the use of brain imaging in this context is in a discovery phase, but has the potential to increase our understanding of the neural underpinnings of chronic pain, inform the development of therapeutic agents, and predict treatment outcomes for use in personalized pain management. The task force proposes standards of evidence that must be satisfied before any brain imaging measure can be considered suitable for clinical or legal purposes. The admissibility of such evidence in legal cases also strongly depends on laws that vary between jurisdictions. For these reasons, the task force concludes that the use of brain imaging findings to support or dispute a claim of chronic pain - effectively as a pain lie detector - is not warranted, but that imaging should be used to further our understanding of the mechanisms underlying pain.

Type: Article
Title: Brain imaging tests for chronic pain: medical, legal and ethical issues and recommendations
Location: England
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1038/nrneurol.2017.122
Publisher version: http://doi.org/10.1038/nrneurol.2017.122
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Keywords: Brain imaging, Chronic pain, Ethics
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences > Neuro, Physiology and Pharmacology
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1574240
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