Somatosensory system articles from across Nature Portfolio

Pain in rheumatoid arthritis often persists independently of joint inflammation. In this issue, Su et al. demonstrate that sustained non-canonical type 1 interferon signaling within peripheral sensory neurons maintains hypersensitivity long after inflammation subsides, revealing a potential therapeutic avenue for chronic arthritic pain.

Tracking ongoing spontaneous pain in individuals with chronic pain is challenging. Using intensive longitudinal functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) combined with continuous spontaneous pain ratings in two individuals with fibromyalgia, we trained personalized brain decoding models that could track moment-to-moment spontaneous pain fluctuations. Underscoring the need for precision approaches, neither decoding model generalized from one individual to the other.

In mice, a circuit between the spinal cord and various regions of the brain, centring on spinal-cord-projecting neurons in the rostral ventromedial medulla, has a key role in driving chronic pain.

Paracrine signalling between tuft cells and enterochromaffin cells is a key mode of immune–sensory and gut–brain communication, and accounts for the pattern of gastrointestinal symptoms that occurs during parasite infections.

In this study, the authors find that ribonuclease 4 (RNase4)-expressing nociceptors, through RNase4, act as regulatory hubs that maintain peripheral nerve stability and coordinate nerve responses to injury, revealing a homeostatic role for nociceptors.

How the brain learns to link a sensory signal to a reward is not fully understood. Here authors show that two types of layer 5 neurons in sensory cortex contribute in different ways, helping the brain recognize relevant sensory cues and refine behavior accordingly.

Survival requires prioritizing threats over pain. The authors identify a brain circuit in male mice, where fear signals from the cortex block pain-associated activation in the thalamus, revealing how fear suppresses pain and offering a potential target for therapies.

Pain in rheumatoid arthritis often persists independently of joint inflammation. In this issue, Su et al. demonstrate that sustained non-canonical type 1 interferon signaling within peripheral sensory neurons maintains hypersensitivity long after inflammation subsides, revealing a potential therapeutic avenue for chronic arthritic pain.

Tracking ongoing spontaneous pain in individuals with chronic pain is challenging. Using intensive longitudinal functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) combined with continuous spontaneous pain ratings in two individuals with fibromyalgia, we trained personalized brain decoding models that could track moment-to-moment spontaneous pain fluctuations. Underscoring the need for precision approaches, neither decoding model generalized from one individual to the other.

Testing large language models on acute-pain vignettes reveals biases in opioid recommendations that particularly affect marginalized groups.

In this Journal Club, Takayuki Yamashita discusses a 2002 study about the role of unmyelinated C-tactile afferents in touch.

Group 2 innate lymphoid cells are crucial for maintaining nerve structure and pain thresholds.