Summary: Mindfulness yoga reduces discomfort by engaging different mental systems, different from the placebo effect. In contrast to mock solutions, meditation yoga was found to be significantly more effective at reducing pain intensity and discomfort.
The study discovered that meditation affects brain regions related to self-awareness and emotional rules, separating problems from the home using developed head imaging. Independent of the placebo reply, this finding supports meditation as a primary treatment for chronic pain.
Important Facts:
- Mindfulness yoga reduces pain through distinct mental processes, unlike placebo.
- The study used advanced head imaging to examine meditation, mock, and fake solutions.
- Mindfulness targets head places related to self-awareness and personal oversight, reducing pain.
Origin: UCSD
Pain is a complex, multifaceted practice shaped by numerous elements beyond physical discomfort, such as a person’s perspective and their expectations of problems. The mock result, the trend for a woman’s symptoms to increase in response to inert treatment, is a well-known example of how expectations can drastically affect a person’s experience.
The placebo response is a long-established feature of mindfulness meditation, which has been practiced for centuries in different cultures. However, researchers have then shown that this is not the case.
A new , investigation, published in , Biological Psychiatry, has revealed that mindfulness meditation engages different brain mechanisms to decrease discomfort compared to those of the sham response.
The study, conducted by researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine, used advanced brain imaging methods to examine the pain-reducing effects of meditation prayer, a sham milk and a” farce” mindfulness meditation in healthy individuals.
The study found that mindfulness meditation significantly reduced the number of complaints about pain intensity and unpleasantness, as well as the number of brain activity patterns related to pain and bad emotions.
In contrast, the placebo cream only slightly altered the brain activity pattern linked to the placebo effect, without affecting the individual’s actual pain experience.
Fadel Zeidan, PhD, professor of anesthesia and endowed professor in empathy and compassion research at UC San Diego Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion, said,” The mind is extremely powerful, and we’re still working on how it can be harnessed for pain management.
In a way that uses no drugs, costs nothing, and is accessible anywhere, mindfulness meditation enables the self to directly alter how we experience pain.
The study included 115 participants, which consisted of two separate clinical trials in healthy participants, who were randomly placed into groups to be given four interventions: a guided mindfulness meditation, a sham-mindfulness meditation that only consisted of deep breathing, a placebo cream ( petroleum jelly ) that participants were trained to believe reduces pain and, as a control, one group listened to an audiobook.
The researchers scanned the participants ‘ brains both before and after the interventions by applying a very painful but harmless heat stimulus to the back of the leg.
The researchers used a novel method known as multivariate pattern analysis ( MVPA ) to unravel the numerous intricate neural pathways that underlie the experience of pain, including those that are caused by particular heat stimulus, negative emotions, and pain responses that are influenced by the placebo effect. The researchers were then able to determine whether mindfulness meditation and a placebo cause similar or distinct brain processes.
Although placebo cream and sham-mindfulness meditation reduced pain, the researchers discovered that mindfulness meditation was significantly more effective at reducing pain than placebo cream, sham-mindfulness meditation, and the controls.
They also found that mindfulness-based pain relief reduced synchronization between brain areas involved in introspection, self-awareness and emotional regulation.
The neural pain signal ( NPS), a documented pattern of brain activity that is thought to be consistent with pain in various people and types of pain, is made up of these various brain regions. In contrast, the placebo cream and sham-mindfulness meditation did not significantly alter the NPS when compared to controls. Instead, these other interventions focused solely on distinct brain processes and little overlap.
The placebo effect and brain mechanisms triggered by active treatments have long been assumed, but these results suggest that this may not be the case when it comes to pain, Zeidan said.
These two brain processes are indistinguishable from one another, which supports the use of mindfulness meditation as a chronic pain treatment rather than a means of triggering the placebo effect.
New therapies are typically deemed effective and trustworthy in modern medicine if they outperform placebo. The findings have significant implications for the development of new treatments for chronic pain because the study found that mindfulness meditation is more effective than placebo and does not engage the same neurobiological processes as placebo. However, more research will need to be done to compare these effects between healthy and chronic pain participants.
The researchers hope that by better understanding the brain functions that underlie mindfulness meditation, they can create more affordable and practical treatments that harness the power of mindfulness to lessen pain in people with a range of medical conditions.
There are more people who are living with chronic pain than we previously thought, and there are millions of people who do so every day. said Zeidan.
” We are excited to continue studying the neurobiology of mindfulness and how we can use this traditional practice in the clinic.”
Gabriel Riegner and Jon Dean from UC San Diego School of Medicine and Tor Wager from Dartmouth College are the study’s co-authors.
The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health provided funding for this work.
About this news from pain research
Author: Miles Martin
Source: UCSD
Contact: Miles Martin – UCSD
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Closed access.
Fadel Zeidan and colleagues ‘ study” To reduce pain, mindfulness meditation and a placebo modulate distinct multivariate neural signatures..” Biological Psychiatry
Abstract
To reduce pain, mindfulness meditation and a placebo modulate distinct multivariate neural signatures.
Background
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 is assumed that mindfulness meditation, which is practiced by maintaining nonjudgmental awareness of arising sensory events, merely reflects the mechanisms invoked by placebo. Recently, brain-based multivariate pattern analysis ( MVPA ) has been validated to successfully disentangle nociceptive-specific, negative-affective, and placebo-based dimensions of the subjective pain experience.
Methods
MVPA pain signatures were used in two randomized clinical trials that used overlapping psychophysical pain testing procedures ( 49°C noxious heat, visual analogue pain scales ) and distinct fMRI techniques ( blood-oxygen-level dependent, perfusion-based ) to determine whether mindfulness meditation engages different brain mechanisms from placebo and sham-mindfulness to reduce pain. After baseline pain testing, 115 healthy participants were randomized into a four-session mindfulness meditation ( n = 37 ), placebo-cream conditioning ( n = 19 ), sham-mindfulness meditation ( n = 20 ), or book-listening ( n = 39 ) intervention. After each intervention, noxious heat was administered during fMRI and each manipulation.
Results
Mindfulness meditation revealed a double dissociation between the MVPA signatures that support pain regulation and placebo-cream. Mindfulness meditation produced significantly greater reductions in pain intensity and pain unpleasantness ratings, nociceptive-specific and negative-affective pain signatures when compared to placebo-cream, sham-mindfulness meditation and controls. Placebo-cream only reduced the placebo-based signature.
Conclusions
To demonstrate mechanistic granularity between mindfulness and meditation, mindfulness meditation and placebo engage distinct neural pain signatures to reduce pain.
