Central sensitisation: causes, therapies, and terminology

Cayrol, Timothée [UCL] van den Broeke, Emanuel [UCL]

We read with interest the Review by Jo Nijs and collegues, 1 which discussed the potential of central sensitisation for precision medicine in rheumatology. The International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) defines central sensitisation as “increased responsiveness of nociceptive neurons in the CNS to their normal or subthreshold input”. However, Nijs and colleagues do not refer to the IASP definition but instead use, without justification, the definition proposed by Woolf 2 in 2011: “an amplification of neural signalling within the CNS that elicits pain hypersensitivity”. Importantly, the latter definition of central sensitisation refers to pain hypersensitivity alone, but throughout their review and in the papers cited, the authors link central sensitisation with various non-pain symptoms (eg, figure 2 of the Review 1 ).