Brain may be key to back pain recovery, study finds
Most people with chronic back pain naturally think their pain is caused by injuries or other problems in the body such as arthritis or bulging disks. But our research team has found that thinking about the root cause of pain as a process that’s occurring in the brain can help promote recovery. That is a key finding of a study my colleagues and I recently published in JAMA Network Open, a monthly open-access medical journal.
We have been studying a psychological treatment called pain reprocessing therapy that may help “turn off” unhelpful and unnecessary pain signals in the brain. To do this, we carried out a study in which some people were randomly chosen to receive the pain reprocessing therapy treatment, while some got a placebo injection into their backs.
We included 151 adults ages 21 to 70 years old with chronic back pain. We found that 66% of participants reported being painfree or nearly pain-free after pain reprocessing therapy, compared with 20% of people who received a placebo.
These results were remarkable because previous trials of psychological treatments rarely led to people reporting full recoveries from chronic pain. So we needed to better understand how this treatment worked: What changed in people’s thinking that helped them recover from chronic back pain?
Why it matters
Chronic pain is one of the biggest health problems today. It is the leading cause of disability in the U.S., and it has an economic cost greater than that of diabetes or cancer.
The most common chronic pain condition is back pain. Many patients — and doctors —