Tor Wager, the Diana L. Taylor Distinguished Professor in Neuroscience and co-leader of the Placebo Neuroimaging Consortium discusses a new meta-analysis that gives the most detailed look yet at the neuroscience of placebo effects! Read more at Dartmouth News
“Meta-analysis of neural systems underlying placebo analgesia from individual participant fMRI data”
Abstract
The brain systems underlying placebo analgesia are insufficiently understood. Here weperformed a systematic, participant-level meta-analysis of experimental functional neuroi-maging studies of evoked pain under stimulus-intensity-matched placebo and control con-ditions, encompassing 603 healthy participants from 20 (out of 28 eligible) studies. Wefindthat placebo vs. control treatments induce small, widespread reductions in pain-relatedactivity, particularly in regions belonging to ventral attention (including mid-insula) andsomatomotor networks (including posterior insula). Behavioral placebo analgesia correlateswith reduced pain-related activity in these networks and the thalamus, habenula, mid-cin-gulate, and supplementary motor area. Placebo-associated activity increases occur mainly infrontoparietal regions, with high between-study heterogeneity. We conclude that placebotreatments affect pain-related activity in multiple brain areas, which may reflect changes innociception and/or other affective and decision-making processes surrounding pain.Between-study heterogeneity suggests that placebo analgesia is a multi-faceted phenomenoninvolving multiple cerebral mechanisms that differ across studies.
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