Single-sweep spectral analysis of contact heat evoked potentials: A novel approach to identify altered cortical processing after morphine treatment

AIMS: The cortical response to nociceptive thermal stimuli recorded as contact heat evoked potentials (CHEPs) may be altered by morphine. However, previous studies have averaged CHEPs over multiple stimuli, which is confounded by jitter between sweeps. Thus, the aim was to assess single-sweep characteristics to identify alterations induced by morphine.

METHODS: In a cross-over study 15 single-sweep CHEPs were analysed from 62 electroencephalography electrodes in 26 healthy volunteers before and after administration of morphine or placebo. Each sweep was decomposed by a continuous wavelet transform to obtain normalised spectral indices in the delta (0.5-4 Hz), theta (4-8 Hz), alpha (8-12 Hz), beta (12-32 Hz) and gamma (32-80 Hz) bands. The average distribution over all sweeps and channels was calculated for the four recordings for each volunteer, and the two recordings before treatments were assessed for reproducibility. Baseline corrected spectral indices after morphine and placebo treatments were compared to identify alterations induced by morphine.

RESULTS: Reproducibility between baseline CHEPs was demonstrated. As compared to placebo, morphine decreased the spectral indices in the delta and theta bands by 13% (P=0.04) and 9% (P=0.007), while the beta and gamma bands were increased by 10% (P=0.006) and 24% (P=0.04).

CONCLUSION: The decreases in the delta and theta band are suggested to represent a decrease in the pain specific morphology of the CHEPs, which indicates a diminished pain response after morphine administration. Hence, assessment of spectral indices in single-sweep CHEPs can be used to study cortical mechanisms induced by morphine treatment.