Affective Neuroscience & Belief
Adam Omary interview Professor Tor Wager on the latest episode of Nature and Nurture Podcast
Special Therapy Brings Relief to Patients With Chronic Back Pain
Our new study, “Effect of Pain Reprocessing Therapy vs Placebo and Usual Care for Patients With Chronic Back Pain: A Randomized Clinical Trial” shows that Psychological treatment centered on changing patients’ beliefs about the causes and threat value of pain may provide substantial and durable pain relief for people with chronic back pain!
The findings provide some of the strongest evidence yet that a psychological treatment can provide potent and durable relief for chronic pain, which afflicts one in five Americans.
“For a long time we have thought that chronic pain is due primarily to problems in the body, and most treatments to date have targeted that,” said lead author Yoni Ashar, who conducted the study while earning his Ph.D. in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at CU Boulder. “This treatment is based on the premise that the brain can generate pain in the absence of injury or after an injury has healed, and that people can unlearn that pain. Our study shows it works.”
Dartmouth News: In Chronic Pain? Changing Your Attitude May Give Relief
U.S.News: Special Therapy Brings Relief to Patients With Chronic Back Pain
CU Boulder Today: How therapy, not pills, can nix chronic pain and change the brain
Denver7 – The Denver Channel: CU Boulder research shows benefits of pain reprocessing therapy
Altmetric News: Effect of Pain Reprocessing Therapy vs Placebo and Usual Care for Patients With Chronic Back Pain
SciTechDaily: Rethinking What Causes Pain: Psychological Treatment Shown To Yield Strong, Lasting Pain Relief
Science Daily: Back pain: Psychological treatment shown to yield strong, lasting pain relief, alter brain networks
Florida News Times: Psychotherapy that has been shown to provide powerful and lasting pain relief and alter brain networks
The Irish News: Give patients with back pain therapy – study suggests
The Sunday Times: Pain reprocessing therapy helps with chronic back pain
Video interviews with participants randomized to PRT
Continue reading “Special Therapy Brings Relief to Patients With Chronic Back Pain”
Discovering the power of placebos
Science writer, Kathryn Hulick covers Dr. Wager’s research in her article, “Discovering the power of placebos” in Science News for Students.
How deeply the placebo effect extends into the brain’s pain system?
According to Dr. Tor Wager, placebos can deaden pain signals coming from the nerves. For some people, it’s as if the brain is “turning off the tap”. Most of the action seems to happen within the brain systems that manage motivation and reward. These are the systems that manage your belief about your pain.
Study Provides Deep Dive on the Neuroscience of Placebo Effects
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
Continue reading “Study Provides Deep Dive on the Neuroscience of Placebo Effects”
Neurologic Pain Signature (NPS) as a “common core pain system” that generalizes across pain types
Our new study, “Common and distinct neural representations of aversive somatic and visceral stimulation in healthy individuals” is published in Nature Communications.
Understanding the common and distinct brain representations underlying visceral and somatic pain is critical for assessing the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying different forms of pain. While previous studies have pointed to both commonalities and differences, this study identifies brain-wide commonalities that generalize across studies and types of painful stimulation, and brain network-level changes that are robust enough to permit brain-based classification of visceral versus somatic pain in independent participants.
This study shows that Neurologic Pain Signature (NPS) responds robustly to both somatic and visceral aversive stimulation, and correlates with the subjective visceral pain experience. This identifies the NPS as a “common core pain system” that generalizes across pain types, including visceral stimulation. Additionally, the study suggests that, contrary to the NPS, existing signatures for nonpainful affective processes (negative emotion, social rejection, and vicarious pain) do not respond consistently to somatic nor visceral stimulation. This demonstrates the sensitivity of the NPS to pain versus other affective processes and implies that visceral pain does not activate more “emotional” brain patterns compared to somatic pain, as commonly assumed.
Can Placebos Work—Even When Patients Know They’re Fake?
The WIRED magazine discusses the study where researchers showed a saline spray “treatment” reduced people’s emotional distress, even though the study subjects knew the spray wouldn’t do anything.
How might this work translate to the real world of mental health treatment?
Professor Tor Wager, a co-author of the study suspects that different “ingredients”—like reinforcing belief in the effectiveness of the placebo at a particular time—could make placebos more or less durable.
Access Nature Communications Article Here
Empathic pain share common neural representations
Our new study “Empathic pain evoked by sensory and emotional-communicative cues share common and process-specific neural representation” published in eLife suggests that pain empathy evoked by observation of acute pain inflictions and facial expressions of pain share common and pain-specific neural representations. In addition to traditional univariate analyses, we employed extensive multivariate pattern analyses, which highlighted common representations centered largely on the bilateral mid-insula. In a further validation step, we showed that the domain-general vicarious pain pattern did not respond to non-painful high-arousal negative stimuli but predicted self-experienced thermal pain.
Continue reading “Empathic pain share common neural representations”
“How on Earth”?
How On Earth | The KGNU Science Show
Interview with Dr. Tor Wager, the director of Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab at Dartmouth College on KGNU Radio Station on The Neuroscience of Pain.
Can interpersonal synchrony enhance patient-provider interaction outcomes?
“Clinician-patient movement synchrony mediates social group effects on interpersonal trust and perceived pain”
Our new study published in the Journal of Pain suggests that interpersonal movement synchrony between the patient and the provider could mediate concordance effects on trust in the clinician and reduce the pain perceived by the patient. Continue reading “Can interpersonal synchrony enhance patient-provider interaction outcomes?”
Challenges, gaps, and ideas to facilitate the development of biomarkers and end points for pain
“Discovery and validation of biomarkers to aid the development of safe and effective pain therapeutics: challenges & opportunities”
In 2018, the NIH-led Discovery and Validation of Biomarkers to Develop Non-Addictive Therapeutics for Pain workshop convened scientific leaders from academia, industry, government and patient advocacy groups to discuss progress, challenges, gaps and ideas to facilitate the development of biomarkers and end points for pain. The outcomes of this workshop are outlined in this Consensus Statement.
A novel approach that could advance the discovery and assessment of analgesic interventions in infancy
“Inferring the infant pain experience: a translational fMRI-based signature study”
This study translates validated adult pain fMRI brain signatures to a nonverbal patient population in which the assessment and management of pain presents a significant clinical challenge. Here we demonstrate that the basic encoding of the sensory discriminative aspects of pain, as represented by the Neurologic Pain Signature (NPS), occurs in both adults and infants, whereas higher-level cognitive modulation of pain, represented by the Stimulus Intensity Independent Pain Signature (SIIPS1) is only present in adults and not observed in infants. This work allows us to use quantitative fMRI observations to make stronger inferences related to pain experience in nonverbal infants. Continue reading “A novel approach that could advance the discovery and assessment of analgesic interventions in infancy”