The Pain Relief for OsteoArthritis through Combined Treatment (PROACT) was a proof-of-principle mechanistic randomized controlled trial to examine the effects of Breathing and Attention Training (BAT), and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on pain modulatory balance, pain-related brain function, and clinical pain in middle-aged to older adults with knee osteoarthritis (OA)....
Phantom limb pain (PLP) is a refractory condition defined by pain experienced in a missing limb. Psilocybin, a classical serotonergic psychedelic drug, can alleviate various treatment-resistant disorders but has scantly been investigated for chronic pain. This placebo-controlled, double-blind, randomized clinical pilot trial (NCT05224336) tested the feasibility, tolerability, and preliminary...
Introduction: Chronic low back pain (cLBP) is a leading cause of disability worldwide and is frequently refractory to pharmacological treatment. Mindfulness meditation has been shown to reduce pain through modulation of self-referential, cognitive and affective mechanisms. However, the neural mechanisms supporting the direct and immediate modulation of movement-evoked cLBP by mindfulness...
Chronic pain with psychological comorbidity, especially posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and/or depression, is a prevalent and costly problem, especially among Veterans. Compassion meditation (CM) is a meditative practice that focuses on developing attentional regulation and the intention to assuage suffering. CM-based approaches show promise in ameliorating physical and mental health...
Mindfulness meditation, a slow breathing practice that is predicated on cultivating nonreactive awareness, also reduces pain. The existing literature has been mixed in demonstrating whether mindfulness meditation is more effective than slow breathing alone (ie, sham-mindfulness meditation) at reducing pain. Furthermore, smaller sample sizes in prior work have hindered a clear understanding of...
Meditation is a family of ancient and contemporary contemplative mind-body practices that can modulate psychological processes, awareness, and mental states. Over the last 40 years, clinical science has manualized meditation practices and designed various meditation interventions that have shown therapeutic efficacy for disorders including depression, pain, addiction, and anxiety. Over the past...
Rather than a passive reflection of nociception, pain is shaped by the interplay between one's experiences, current cognitive-affective states, and expectations. The placebo response, a paradoxical yet reliable phenomenon, is postulated to reduce pain by engaging mechanisms shared with active therapies. It has been assumed that mindfulness meditation, practiced by sustaining nonjudgmental...
Positive emotions are a promising target for intervention in chronic pain, but mixed findings across trials to date suggest that existing interventions may not be optimized to efficiently engage the target. The aim of the current pilot mechanistic randomized controlled trial was to test the effects of a positive emotion-enhancing intervention called Savoring Meditation on pain-related neural...
Chronic low back pain (cLBP) is the most prevalent chronic pain condition. There are no treatments that haven been found to directly assuage evoked cLBP. To this extent, mindfulness-meditation is a promising pain therapy. Yet, it is unclear if meditation can be utilized to directly attenuate evoked chronic pain through endogenous opioids. A double-blind, randomized, and placebo-controlled...
Abstract & Learning Objectives:For millenniums, mindfulness was believed to diminish pain by reducing the influence of self-appraisals of noxious sensations. Today, mindfulness meditation is a highly popular and effective pain therapy that is believed to engage multiple, nonplacebo-related mechanisms to attenuate pain. Recent evidence suggests that mindfulness meditation-induced pain relief is...
Mindfulness is theorized to decrease the affective amplification of chronic pain by facilitating a shift from emotionally-laden, catastrophic pain appraisals of nociceptive input to reappraising chronic pain as an innocuous sensory signal that does not signify harm. Understanding of these hypothetical psychological mechanisms of mindfulness-based analgesia has been limited by a lack of direct...
Frontiers in Pain Research2023Ramakrishnan Mani, Divya Bharatkumar Adhia, Sharon Awatere et al.3 citations
Knee osteoarthritis (OA) is a chronic secondary musculoskeletal pain condition resulting in disability, reduced quality of life, and high societal costs. Pain associated with knee OA is linked to increased sensitivity in sensory, cognitive, and emotional areas of the brain. Self-regulation training targeting brain functioning related to pain experience could reduce pain and its associated...
ABSTRACT: For millenniums, mindfulness was believed to diminish pain by reducing the influence of self-appraisals of noxious sensations. Today, mindfulness meditation is a highly popular and effective pain therapy that is believed to engage multiple, nonplacebo-related mechanisms to attenuate pain. Recent evidence suggests that mindfulness meditation-induced pain relief is associated with the...
Gun violence is a significant problem in the United States of America. Gun violence produces lifelong psychological adversity, trauma, and grief. In the face of this epidemic, efficacious therapies that assuage gun violence-based trauma and negative health are lacking. The proposed, longitudinal pilot experiment examined the effects of an 8-week mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) program...
A randomized controlled trial tested whether mindfulness training would increase lab-based and in vivo spontaneous helping behaviors toward racial outgroup members. First, across conditions, those scoring higher in baseline trait mindfulness showed higher levels of preintervention lab-based and ecological momentary assessment (EMA)-based helping behavior. Next, short-term (4-day) training in...
This review examines recent (2016 onwards) neuroscientific findings on the mechanisms supporting mindfulness-associated pain relief. To date, its clear that mindfulness lowers pain by engaging brain processes that are distinct from placebo and vary across meditative training level. Due to rapid developments in the field of contemplative neuroscience, an update review on the neuroimaging studies...
The development of chronic pain is a complex mechanism that is still not fully understood. Multiple somatic and visceral afferent pain signals, when experienced over time, cause a strengthening of certain neural circuitry through peripheral and central sensitization, resulting in the physical and emotional perceptual chronic pain experience. The mind-altering qualities of psychedelics have been...
The endogenous opioidergic system is critically involved in the cognitive modulation of pain. Slow-breathing-based techniques are widely used nonpharmacological approaches to reduce pain. Yet, the active mechanisms of actions supporting these practices are poorly characterized. Growing evidence suggest that mindfulness-meditation, a slow-breathing technique practiced by nonreactively attending...
In social contexts, the dynamic nature of others' emotions places unique demands on attention and emotion regulation. Mindfulness, characterized by heightened and receptive moment-to-moment attending, may be well-suited to meet these demands. In particular, mindfulness may support more effective cognitive control in social situations via efficient deployment of top-down attention. To test this,...
The advent of neuroimaging methodologies, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), has significantly advanced our understanding of the neurophysiological processes supporting a wide spectrum of mind-body approaches to treat pain. A promising self-regulatory practice, mindfulness meditation, reliably alleviates experimentally induced and clinical pain. Yet, the neural mechanisms...
Mindfulness-based training reduces pain in clinical and experimental settings. Evidence suggests that these beneficial effects are facilitated via an increased focus on the present moment and a reduced emotional enhancement of pain. Most of the existing literature has focused on mindfulness as a learned skill and on the neural mechanisms that underlie the acquisition of this skill. It is...
Interindividual differences in pain sensitivity vary as a function of interactions between sensory, cognitive-affective, and dispositional factors. Trait mindfulness, characterized as the innate capacity to nonreactively sustain attention to the present moment, is a psychological construct that is associated with lower clinical pain outcomes. Yet, the neural mechanisms supporting dispositional...
Fibromyalgia is a disorder characterized by widespread pain and a spectrum of psychological comorbidities, rendering treatment difficult and often a financial burden. Fibromyalgia is a complicated chronic pain condition that requires a multimodal therapeutic approach to optimize treatment efficacy. Thus, it has been postulated that mind-body techniques may prove fruitful in treating...
Pain is a multidimensional experience that involves interacting sensory, cognitive, and affective factors, rendering the treatment of chronic pain challenging and financially burdensome. Further, the widespread use of opioids to treat chronic pain has led to an opioid epidemic characterized by exponential growth in opioid misuse and addiction. The staggering statistics related to opioid use...