Correspondence to Tesarz et al. Alterations in endogenous pain modulation in endurance athletes: An experimental study using quantitative sensory testing and the cold-pressor task. PAIN? 154, 1022-29, 2013

摘要

With great interest we read the paper published by Tesarz et al. [10] in PAIN. The authors found a reduced analgesic response to a heterotopic noxious stimulus in a so-called conditioned pain modulation (CPM) paradigm in endurance athletes compared to untrained control subjects. This is astonishing because physical activity has been suggested to be an appropriate treatment of many chronic pain disorders such as headache or flbromyalgia [1,2]. On the other hand, weakly supporting an analgesic effect of endurance training, Tesarz et al. found nonsignificant trends for increased QST pain thresholds, lower unconditioned heat pain perception, and marginally increased cold pain tolerance in the athletes. Although the authors included the cold pressor (CP) ratings as covariates in their CPM analysis, they did not include the lower pain rating of the unconditioned heat pain.