Tor Wager featured on CBC Radio’s The Current with Matt Galloway

Listen here! The chronic pain segment begins @ 47:00.

Many Canadians suffer from debilitating chronic back pain, affecting their work, relationships and even mental health. We hear from researchers about a treatment called pain reprocessing therapy, which could offer some sweet relief by re-framing that pain in our minds.

CBC Radio’s The Current is a meeting place of perspectives with a fresh take on issues that affect Canadians today.

Faculty Profile: Tor Wager and Breaking the Neural Code

Tor Wager, the Diana L. Taylor Distinguished Professor in Neuroscience, helps lead Dartmouth’s Breaking the Neural Code academic cluster, which includes research on how placebos affect patients who are feeling pain. “We study how the brain creates mental models, belief structures, that then guide how we experience the world, and in particular how we experience pain,” Wager says.

Special Therapy Brings Relief to Patients With Chronic Back Pain

 JAMA Psychiatry, published online September 29:

Our new study,  “Effect of Pain Reprocessing Therapy vs Placebo and Usual Care for Patients With Chronic Back Pain: A Randomized Clinical Trialshows 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

 

fMRI activity during pain is reduced in the areas shown in blue. Many of these are involved in constructing the experience of pain. Activity is increased in the areas shown in red and yellow, which involve the control of cognition and memory. (Image provided by M.Zunhammer et al.)

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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.

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Can Placebos Work—Even When Patients Know They’re Fake?

WIRED

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