Placebo treatment affects brain systems related to affective and cognitive processes, but not nociceptive pain.

ABSTRACT: Placebo analgesia is a replicable and well-studied phenomenon, yet it remains unclear to what degree it includes modulation of nociceptive processes. Some studies find effects consistent with nociceptive effects, but meta-analyses show that these effects are often small. We analyzed placebo analgesia in a large fMRI study (N = 392), including placebo effects on brain responses to noxious stimuli. Placebo treatment caused robust analgesia in both conditioned thermal and unconditioned mechanical pain. Placebo did not decrease fMRI activity in nociceptive pain regions, including the Neurologic Pain Signature (NPS) and pre-registered spinothalamic pathway regions, with strong support from Bayes Factor analyses. However, placebo treatment affected activity in pre-registered analyses of a second

SUBMITTER: Botvinik-Nezer R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10543005 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature