Mindfulness Interventions for Adolescents With Chronic Pain: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.
European journal of pain (London, England) May 1, 2026 Cynthia Harbeck-Weber, Sammy T Murad, Neha Ramachandran et al.
Mindfulness-based interventions for adolescents with chronic pain are associated with improvements in pain intensity, catastrophizing, acceptance, interference, functioning, quality of life, depression, and anxiety, with moderate to large effect sizes at follow-up. A systematic review and meta-analysis of 14 studies including 323 adolescents found significant within-group improvements across all outcomes, though heterogeneity was moderate to high and certainty low due to risk of bias and pre-post designs. Variable-length interventions showed greater pre-post changes than standardized long interventions. Rigorous randomized controlled trials are needed to substantiate these results.