Papers of the Week

The role of pain as a warning system necessitates a rapid transmission of information from the periphery for the execution of appropriate motor responses. The nociceptive withdrawal reflex (NWR) is a physiological response to protect the limb from a painful stimulus and is often considered an objective measure of spinal nociceptive excitability. The NWR is commonly defined by its latency in the presumed A-fiber range consistent with the canonical view that "fast pain" is signaled by A nociceptors. We recently demonstrated that human skin is equipped with ultrafast (A range) nociceptors. Here, we investigated the short-latency component of the reflex and explored the relationship between reflex latency and pain perception.