Huang S, Wakaizumi K, Wu B, et al. - Researchers investigated resting-state functional MRI-based functional connectivity networks in chronic back pain patients with clear evidence for lumbar disk herniation (LDH) (LDH-chronic pain n = 146) vs healthy controls (HCs, n = 165). As this study was conducted in China, they further examined how culture influences brain functional reorganization with chronic pain. Discovery and validation subgroups, both comprised 68 LDH-chronic pain and 68 HC, and the data were compared with an off-site data set (n = 272, NITRC 1000). Relative to HC group, discovery and validation groups exhibited significantly decreased graph disruption indices derived from 3 network topological measurements, degree, clustering coefficient, and efficiency, which respectively represent network hubness, segregation, and integration, across all predefined link densities. However, the discovery group indicated a decreased global mean clustering coefficient and betweenness centrality; these showed a trend in the validation group. To males with high education, the association between pain and graph disruption indices was confined. The results slightly differ from recent alike analysis for other musculoskeletal chronic pain conditions