Regional brain responses associated with thermogenic and psychogenic sweating events in humans

Abstract

Sweating events occur in response to mental stress (psychogenic) or with increased body temperature (thermogenic). We previously found that both were linked to activation of common brain stem regions, suggesting that they share the same output pathways: a putative common premotor nucleus was identified in the rostral-lateral medulla (Farrell MJ, Trevaks D, Taylor NA, McAllen RM. Am J Physiol Regul Integr Comp Physiol 304: R810–R817, 2013). We therefore looked in higher brain regions for the neural basis that differentiates the two types of sweating event. Previous work has identified hemispheric activations linked to psychogenic sweating, but no corresponding data have been reported for ther..