Complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS1) is a chronic progressive disease characterized by severe pain without demonstrable nerve lesion. It often affects an arm or a leg and may spread to another part of the body. In a previous study biopsychologists and neurologists from Bochum had shown that CRPS-patients have a remarkable shift of the visual subjective body midline, a correlate of the egocentric reference frame, towards the affected side (Reinersmann et al., 2010). However, this first study fell short of showing if this asymmetrical change of the egocentric computation was specific for CRPS. Now, the same team is able to report that this asymmetric subjective shift towards the left side is specific for CRPS1-patients with right sided pain and does not occur in controls or in patients with other types of chronic pain. Thus, right-affected CRPS1-patients display an asymmetrical attentional spatial focus that is thought to result from unilateral CRPS pain inducing a somatosensory imbalance, with pain providing ''exaggerated'' input from the affected side. This then could distort visuospatial perception, including perceptual representation of one's own body. This study shows that CRPS1 is a syndrome of sensory-motor-autonomic dysfunctions that goes along with neural changes that control lateralized attentional systems.
The editors of the journal thought this discovery to be of great importance and associated it with an invited commentary (Greenspan, 2012).

Reinersmann, A., Landwehrt, J., Krumova, E.K., Ocklenburg, S., Güntürkün, O., Maier, C. (2012). Impaired spatial body representation in complex regional pain syndrome type 1 (CRPS I). Pain, 153, 2174-2181.