AGING EFFECTS ON THE PERCEPTION OF NOXIOUS AND NONNOXIOUS THERMAL STIMULI APPLIED TO THE FACE

While age-related sensory deficits have been demonstrated for the sens es of vision, audition, and the chemical senses, reports have differed with regard to changes in painful and non-painful thermal sensation, One hundred and seventy-nine healthy, community-dwelling individuals a ged 20-89 years rated threshold and suprathreshold warming, cooling, a nd painful stimuli delivered to glabrous (upper lip) and hairy (chin) sites of the face in three separate testing sessions. Threshold measur es were determined by the Method of Limits. Suprathreshold stimuli wer e assessed by a cross-modality matching procedure and a Pooled Adjacen t Violators Algorithm-based analysis. The analyses of the effect of ag e on the threshold and suprathreshold measures of sensory performance yielded disparate findings. There are modest changes in warming and co oling perception with increased age, but pain perception is relatively unaffected. There is a slight diminution in threshold and suprathresh old thermal performance with increasing aging.