Painful cutaneous electrical stimulation vs. heat pain as test stimuli in conditioned pain modulation

Different paradigms can assess the effect of conditioned pain modulation (CPM). The aim of the present study was to compare heat pain, as an often used test stimulus (TS), to painful cutaneous electrical stimulation (PCES), having the advantage of the additional recording of PCES-related evoked potentials. In 28 healthy subjects we applied heat and PCES at the dominant hand as test stimulus (TS) to compare the CPM-effect elicited by hand immersion into cold water (10 °C) as conditioning stimulus (CS). Subjects rated the pain intensity of TS at baseline, during and 5 min after CS application and additionally of CS, on a numerical rating scale (NRS) (0–100). The "early" (during CS–before CS) and 'late' (after CS–before CS) CPM-effects were analyzed. Parallel to the PCES, the related evoked potentials were recorded via Cz to evaluate any changes in PCES-amplitudes. CS reduced significantly the pain intensity of both PCES and heat pain as TS. On a group level, the CPM-effect did not differ significantly between both paradigms. Both early and late CPM-effect based on PCES correlated significantly with the CS pain intensity (\(\it r\) = −0.630 and −0.503, respectively), whereas using heat pain the correlation was not significant. We found a significant reduction of PCES-amplitudes during CS, but this did not correlate with the PCES-induced pain intensity. Correlation with the CS painfulness \(\it r\) = −0.464) did not achieve the significance level after Bonferroni correction. The extent of the CPM effects was similar in both testing paradigms at group level, despite intraindividual differences. Future studies should further elicit the exact mechanisms explaining the modality of these specific differences