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

ABSTRACT: Drug treatments for pain often do not outperform placebo, and a better understanding of placebo mechanisms is needed to improve treatment development and clinical practice. In a large-scale fMRI study (N = 392) with pre-registered analyses, we tested whether placebo analgesic treatment modulates nociceptive processes, and whether its effects generalize from conditioned to unconditioned pain modalities. Placebo treatment caused robust analgesia in conditioned thermal pain that generalized to unconditioned mechanical pain. However, placebo did not decrease pain-related fMRI activity in brain measures linked to nociceptive pain, including the Neurologic Pain Signature (NPS) and spinothalamic pathway regions, with strong support for null effects in Bayes Factor analyses. In addition, surprisin

SUBMITTER: Botvinik-Nezer R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11255344 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature