Scholars@Duke
Katherine Martucci

Katherine Martucci

Associate Professorship in Anesthesiology
Anesthesiology
katherine.martucci@duke.edu
DUMC 3094, Durham, NC 27710
3 Genome Ct, Durham, NC 27710

Selected Publications

Reply to the Letter to the Editor.

Journal Article Arthritis Rheumatol · December 26, 2025 Full text Link to item Cite

Preclinical perspectives on disorders of the temporomandibular joint: Tracing the past, navigating the present, and shaping the future.

Journal Article J Pain · November 2025 Temporomandibular disorders (TMDs) are complex conditions characterized by orofacial pain and dysfunction, affecting a significant portion of the population. TMDs may involve joint and/or muscle pain, dysfunction (e.g., noise, limited or altered jaw moveme ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Pain in systemic lupus erythematosus: emerging insights and paradigms.

Journal Article Nat Rev Rheumatol · October 2025 Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is a chronic autoimmune disease characterized by protean clinical manifestations that are associated with immune system dysregulation. Of these manifestations, pain and pain-related symptoms such as fatigue, mood disturba ... Full text Link to item Cite

Reduced trapezius pressure pain threshold in fibromyalgia and opioid use.

Journal Article J Pain · August 2025 While opioid medications are potent analgesics, their usage in chronic pain conditions can paradoxically result in opioid-induced hyperalgesia (i.e., enhanced pain sensitivity). However, among individuals with chronic pain, minimal research has examined th ... Full text Link to item Cite

Cross-sectional relationships between spinal cord gray matter volume and pain in individuals with fibromyalgia and opioid use.

Journal Article Sci Rep · July 30, 2025 Brain gray matter volume (GMV) has been extensively examined in chronic pain and opioid therapy, but spinal GMV has not. As a first investigation of spinal cord GMV in chronic pain and opioid therapy, as our primary outcome, we compared averaged C5-C7 GMV ... Full text Link to item Cite

Neural correlates of altered reward-driven attention in chronic pain and opioid use.

Journal Article Sci Rep · April 25, 2025 While attentional processing of reward may be altered in chronic pain, the neural circuits underlying these alterations, and impact from opioid use have remained unclear. To investigate the neural representation of attentional processing in chronic pain, w ... Full text Link to item Cite

EPISeg: Automated segmentation of the spinal cord on echo planar images using open-access multi-center data.

Journal Article bioRxiv · January 27, 2025 Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the spinal cord is relevant for studying sensation, movement, and autonomic function. Preprocessing of spinal cord fMRI data involves segmentation of the spinal cord on gradient-echo echo planar imaging (EPI) ... Full text Link to item Cite

EPISeg: Automated segmentation of the spinal cord on echo planar images using open-access multi-center data.

Journal Article Imaging Neurosci (Camb) · 2025 Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the spinal cord is relevant for studying sensation, movement, and autonomic function. Preprocessing of spinal cord fMRI data involves segmentation of the spinal cord on gradient-echo echo planar imaging (EPI) ... Full text Link to item Cite

Neuroimaging of opioid effects in humans across conditions of acute administration, chronic pain therapy, and opioid use disorder.

Journal Article Trends Neurosci · June 2024 Evidence of central nervous system (CNS) exogenous opioid effects in humans has been primarily gained through neuroimaging of three participant populations: individuals after acute opioid administration, those with opioid use disorder (OUD), and those with ... Full text Link to item Cite

Enhanced motor network engagement during reward gain anticipation in fibromyalgia.

Journal Article Cortex · April 2024 Reward motivation is essential in shaping human behavior and cognition. Both reward motivation and reward brain circuits are altered in chronic pain conditions, including fibromyalgia. In this study of fibromyalgia patients, we used a data-driven independe ... Full text Link to item Cite

Links between brain neuroimaging and blood inflammatory markers in urological chronic pelvic pain syndrome.

Journal Article Physiol Behav · November 1, 2023 Urological chronic pelvic pain syndrome (UCPPS) is a debilitating painful condition with unclear etiology. Prior researchers have indicated that compared to healthy controls, patients with UCPPS demonstrated altered brain activity. Researchers have also sh ... Full text Link to item Cite

Perioperative changes in neurocognitive and Alzheimer's disease-related cerebrospinal fluid biomarkers in older patients randomised to isoflurane or propofol for anaesthetic maintenance.

Journal Article Br J Anaesth · August 2023 BACKGROUND: Animal studies have shown that isoflurane and propofol have differential effects on Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathology and memory, although it is unclear whether this occurs in humans. METHODS: This was a nested randomised controlled trial with ... Full text Link to item Cite

Reduced Spinal Cord Gray Matter in Patients with Fibromyalgia Using Opioids Long-term.

Journal Article medRxiv · May 2, 2023 OBJECTIVE: Chronic pain involves alterations in brain gray matter volume (GMV). Moreover, opioid medications are known to reduce GMV in numerous brain regions involved in pain processing. However, no research has evaluated (1) chronic pain-related GMV alte ... Full text Link to item Cite

Altered Functional Networks during Gain Anticipation in Fibromyalgia.

Journal Article medRxiv · April 29, 2023 Reward motivation is essential in shaping human behavior and cognition. Previous studies have shown altered reward motivation and reward brain circuitry in chronic pain conditions, including fibromyalgia. Fibromyalgia is a chronic disorder characterized by ... Full text Link to item Cite

Interplay between noxious heat sensitivity and temporal summation magnitude in patients with fibromyalgia and long-term opioid use.

Journal Article Front Neurosci · 2023 INTRODUCTION: In chronic pain conditions such as fibromyalgia (FM), pain amplification within the central nervous system, or "central sensitization," may contribute to the development and maintenance of chronic pain. Chronic pain treatments include opioid ... Full text Link to item Cite

Replication of neural responses to monetary incentives and exploration of reward-influenced network connectivity in fibromyalgia.

Journal Article Neuroimage Rep · December 2022 Neuroimaging research has begun to implicate alterations of brain reward systems in chronic pain. Previously, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a monetary incentive delay (MID) task, Martucci et al. (2018) showed that neural responses ... Full text Link to item Cite

Altered resting-state functional connectivity within corticostriatal and subcortical-striatal circuits in chronic pain.

Journal Article Sci Rep · July 25, 2022 Brain corticostriatal circuits are important for understanding chronic pain and highly relevant to motivation and cognitive processes. It has been demonstrated that in patients with chronic back pain, altered nucleus accumbens (NAcc)-medial prefrontal cort ... Full text Link to item Cite

Postoperative changes in cognition and cerebrospinal fluid neurodegenerative disease biomarkers.

Journal Article Ann Clin Transl Neurol · February 2022 OBJECTIVE: Numerous investigators have theorized that postoperative changes in Alzheimer's disease neuropathology may underlie postoperative neurocognitive disorders. Thus, we determined the relationship between postoperative changes in cognition and cereb ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Altered Reward Processing and Sex Differences in Chronic Pain.

Journal Article Front Neurosci · 2022 Chronic pain and reward processing are understood to be reciprocally related to one another. Previous studies of reward processing in chronic pain patients have reported incongruent findings. While several factors likely contribute to these disparate findi ... Full text Link to item Cite

Evaluation by Survival Analysis of Cold Pain Tolerance in Patients with Fibromyalgia and Opioid Use.

Journal Article J Pain Res · 2022 PURPOSE: The cold pressor test (CPT) is a clinical pain research method used to measure cold pain tolerance. During this test, participants immerse an extremity (ie, hand or foot) into cold water for as long as tolerable. The duration of the test (traditio ... Full text Link to item Cite

Perioperative neurocognitive and functional neuroimaging trajectories in older APOE4 carriers compared with non-carriers: secondary analysis of a prospective cohort study.

Journal Article Br J Anaesth · December 2021 BACKGROUND: Cognitive dysfunction after surgery is a major issue in older adults. Here, we determined the effect of APOE4 on perioperative neurocognitive function in older patients. METHODS: We enrolled 140 English-speaking patients ≥60 yr old scheduled fo ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Relationship Between Blood Cytokine Levels, Psychological Comorbidity, and Widespreadness of Pain in Chronic Pelvic Pain.

Journal Article Front Psychiatry · 2021 Background: Low-grade inflammation has been implicated in the etiology of depression, long-term fatigue and chronic pain. TNFα and IL-6 are perhaps the most studied pro-inflammatory cytokines in the field of psychoneuroimmunology. The purpose of our study ... Full text Link to item Cite

Spinal Cord Resting State Activity in Individuals With Fibromyalgia Who Take Opioids.

Journal Article Front Neurol · 2021 Chronic pain coincides with myriad functional alterations throughout the brain and spinal cord. While spinal cord mechanisms of chronic pain have been extensively characterized in animal models and in vitro, to date, research in patients with chronic pain ... Full text Link to item Cite

Apparent Effects of Opioid Use on Neural Responses to Reward in Chronic Pain.

Journal Article Sci Rep · July 3, 2019 Featured Publication Neural responses to incentives are altered in chronic pain and by opioid use. To understand how opioid use modulates the neural response to reward/value in chronic pain, we compared brain functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) responses to a monetary ... Full text Link to item Cite

Urologic chronic pelvic pain syndrome: insights from the MAPP Research Network.

Journal Article Nat Rev Urol · March 2019 Urologic chronic pelvic pain syndrome (UCPPS), which encompasses interstitial cystitis/bladder pain syndrome and chronic prostatitis/chronic pelvic pain syndrome, is characterized by chronic pain in the pelvic region or genitalia that is often accompanied ... Full text Link to item Cite

Altered Cervical Spinal Cord Resting-State Activity in Fibromyalgia.

Journal Article Arthritis Rheumatol · March 2019 Featured Publication OBJECTIVE: Altered afferent input and central neural modulation are thought to contribute to fibromyalgia symptoms, and these processes converge within the spinal cord. We undertook this study to investigate the hypothesis that, using resting-state functio ... Full text Link to item Cite

Neuroimaging-based pain biomarkers: definitions, clinical and research applications, and evaluation frameworks to achieve personalized pain medicine.

Journal Article Pain Rep · 2019 One of the key ambitions of neuroimaging-based pain biomarker research is to augment patient and clinician reporting of clinically relevant phenomena with neural measures for prediction, prognosis, and detection of pain. Despite years of productive researc ... Full text Link to item Cite

Altered prefrontal correlates of monetary anticipation and outcome in chronic pain.

Journal Article Pain · August 2018 Featured Publication Chronic pain may alter both affect- and value-related behaviors, which represents a potentially treatable aspect of chronic pain experience. Current understanding of how chronic pain influences the function of brain reward systems, however, is limited. Usi ... Full text Link to item Cite

Cold Water Pressor Test Differentially Modulates Functional Network Connectivity in Fibromyalgia Patients Compared with Healthy Controls.

Conference Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc · July 2018 Fibromyalgia is a multifaceted chronic pain condition of unknown etiology. Conditioned pain modulation (CPM) such as cold water pressor test of the foot, is widely documented as being disrupted in patients with fibromyalgia. To date, the mechanisms underly ... Full text Link to item Cite

Neuroimaging of Pain: Human Evidence and Clinical Relevance of Central Nervous System Processes and Modulation.

Journal Article Anesthesiology · June 2018 Featured Publication Neuroimaging research has demonstrated definitive involvement of the central nervous system in the development, maintenance, and experience of chronic pain. Structural and functional neuroimaging has helped elucidate central nervous system contributors to ... Full text Link to item Cite

Brain signature and functional impact of centralized pain: a multidisciplinary approach to the study of chronic pelvic pain (MAPP) network study.

Journal Article Pain · October 2017 Chronic pain is often measured with a severity score that overlooks its spatial distribution across the body. This widespread pain is believed to be a marker of centralization, a central nervous system process that decouples pain perception from nociceptiv ... Full text Link to item Cite

Investigating the BOLD spectral power of the intrinsic connectivity networks in fibromyalgia patients: A resting-state fMRI study.

Conference Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc · July 2017 Recent advances in multivariate statistical analysis of blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have provided novel insights into the network organization of the human brain. Here, we applied group independent compo ... Full text Link to item Cite

Resting-state functional connectivity predicts longitudinal pain symptom change in urologic chronic pelvic pain syndrome: a MAPP network study.

Journal Article Pain · June 2017 Chronic pain symptoms often change over time, even in individuals who have had symptoms for years. Studying biological factors that predict trends in symptom change in chronic pain may uncover novel pathophysiological mechanisms and potential therapeutic t ... Full text Link to item Cite

Brain white matter changes associated with urological chronic pelvic pain syndrome: multisite neuroimaging from a MAPP case-control study.

Journal Article Pain · December 2016 Clinical phenotyping of urological chronic pelvic pain syndromes (UCPPSs) in men and women have focused on end organ abnormalities to identify putative clinical subtypes. Initial evidence of abnormal brain function and structure in male pelvic pain has nec ... Full text Link to item Cite

Imaging Pain.

Journal Article Anesthesiol Clin · June 2016 The challenges and understanding of acute and chronic pain have been illuminated through the advancement of central neuroimaging. Through neuroimaging research, new technology and findings have allowed us to identify and understand the neural mechanisms co ... Full text Link to item Cite

The posterior medial cortex in urologic chronic pelvic pain syndrome: detachment from default mode network-a resting-state study from the MAPP Research Network.

Journal Article Pain · September 2015 Altered resting-state (RS) brain activity, as a measure of functional connectivity (FC), is commonly observed in chronic pain. Identifying a reliable signature pattern of altered RS activity for chronic pain could provide strong mechanistic insights and se ... Full text Link to item Cite

Brain White Matter Abnormalities in Female Interstitial Cystitis/Bladder Pain Syndrome: A MAPP Network Neuroimaging Study.

Journal Article J Urol · July 2015 PURPOSE: Several chronic pain conditions may be distinguished by condition specific brain anatomical and functional abnormalities on imaging, which are suggestive of underlying disease processes. We present what is to our knowledge the first characterizati ... Full text Link to item Cite

Increased brain gray matter in the primary somatosensory cortex is associated with increased pain and mood disturbance in patients with interstitial cystitis/painful bladder syndrome.

Journal Article J Urol · January 2015 PURPOSE: Interstitial cystitis is a highly prevalent pain condition estimated to affect 3% to 6% of women in the United States. Emerging data suggest there are central neurobiological components to the etiology of this disease. We report the first brain st ... Full text Link to item Cite

Preliminary structural MRI based brain classification of chronic pelvic pain: A MAPP network study.

Journal Article Pain · December 2014 Neuroimaging studies have shown that changes in brain morphology often accompany chronic pain conditions. However, brain biomarkers that are sensitive and specific to chronic pelvic pain (CPP) have not yet been adequately identified. Using data from the Tr ... Full text Link to item Cite

Distinct brain mechanisms support spatial vs temporal filtering of nociceptive information.

Journal Article Pain · December 2014 The role of endogenous analgesic mechanisms has largely been viewed in the context of gain modulation during nociceptive processing. However, these analgesic mechanisms may play critical roles in the extraction and subsequent utilization of information rel ... Full text Link to item Cite

Neuroimaging chronic pain: what have we learned and where are we going?

Journal Article Future Neurol · November 2014 Advances in neuroimaging have helped illuminate our understanding of how the brain works in the presence of chronic pain, which often persists with unknown etiology or after the painful stimulus has been removed and any wounds have healed. Neuroimaging has ... Full text Link to item Cite

Alterations in resting state oscillations and connectivity in sensory and motor networks in women with interstitial cystitis/painful bladder syndrome.

Journal Article J Urol · September 2014 PURPOSE: The pathophysiology of interstitial cystitis/painful bladder syndrome remains incompletely understood but is thought to involve central disturbance in the processing of pain and viscerosensory signals. We identified differences in brain activity a ... Full text Link to item Cite

Neural correlates of mindfulness meditation-related anxiety relief.

Journal Article Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci · June 2014 Anxiety is the cognitive state related to the inability to control emotional responses to perceived threats. Anxiety is inversely related to brain activity associated with the cognitive regulation of emotions. Mindfulness meditation has been found to regul ... Full text Link to item Cite

Pain sensitivity is inversely related to regional grey matter density in the brain.

Journal Article Pain · March 2014 Pain is a highly personal experience that varies substantially among individuals. In search of an anatomical correlate of pain sensitivity, we used voxel-based morphometry to investigate the relationship between grey matter density across the whole brain a ... Full text Link to item Cite

Opioid-independent mechanisms supporting offset analgesia and temporal sharpening of nociceptive information.

Journal Article Pain · June 2012 The mechanisms supporting temporal processing of pain remain poorly understood. To determine the involvement of opioid mechanisms in temporal processing of pain, responses to dynamic noxious thermal stimuli and offset analgesia were assessed after administ ... Full text Link to item Cite

Differential effects of experimental central sensitization on the time-course and magnitude of offset analgesia.

Journal Article Pain · February 2012 Pain perception is temporally altered during states of chronic pain and acute central sensitization; however, the mechanisms contributing to temporal processing of nociceptive information remain poorly understood. Offset analgesia is a phenomenon that refl ... Full text Link to item Cite

Brain mechanisms supporting the modulation of pain by mindfulness meditation.

Journal Article J Neurosci · April 6, 2011 The subjective experience of one's environment is constructed by interactions among sensory, cognitive, and affective processes. For centuries, meditation has been thought to influence such processes by enabling a nonevaluative representation of sensory ev ... Full text Link to item Cite