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Cognitive behavioral training reverses the effect of pain exposure on brain network activity
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Cognitive behavioral training reverses the effect of pain exposure on brain network activity

Aaron Kucyi, Tim V Salomons and Karen D Davis
Pain (Amsterdam), v 157(9), pp 1895-1904
Sep 2016
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1097/j.pain.0000000000000592
PMID: 27101426
Featured in Collection :   UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel
url
https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/66024/1/CBT_fMRI_ms_Pain_R1_final.pdfView
Accepted (AM)Open Access (License Unspecified),  Open

Abstract

Adult Analysis of Variance Brain Mapping Cognitive Behavioral Therapy - methods Cognitive Reserve - physiology Female Healthy Volunteers Humans Image Processing, Computer-Assisted Male Neuropsychological Tests Oxygen - blood Pain - physiopathology Pain - psychology Pain - rehabilitation Pain Measurement Pain Threshold - physiology Physical Stimulation - adverse effects Prefrontal Cortex - diagnostic imaging Prefrontal Cortex - physiopathology Rest Time Factors Young Adult
Repeated sensory exposures shape the brain's function and its responses to environmental stimuli. An important clinical and scientific question is how exposure to pain affects brain network activity and whether that activity is modifiable with training. We sought to determine whether repeated pain exposure would impact brain network activity and whether these effects can be reversed by cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)-based training. Healthy subjects underwent 8 experimental sessions on separate days on which they received painful thermal stimuli. They were randomly assigned to groups receiving either CBT-based training (regulate group, n = 17) or a non-pain-focused treatment (control group, n = 13). Before and after these sessions, participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during painful stimulation and at rest. The effect of repeated pain over time in the control group was a decrease in the neurotypical pain-evoked default mode network (DMN) deactivation. The regulate group did not show these DMN effects but rather had decreased deactivation of the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (R vlPFC) of the executive control network. In the regulate group, reduced pain-evoked DMN deactivation was associated with greater individual reduction in pain intensity and unpleasantness over time. Finally, the regulate group showed enhanced resting functional connectivity between areas of the DMN and executive control network over time, compared with the control group. Our study demonstrates that trainable cognitive states can alter the effect of repeated sensory exposure on the brain. The findings point to the potential utility of cognitive training to prevent changes in brain network connectivity that occur with repeated experience of pain.

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31 citations in Web of Science
34 citations in Scopus

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UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

This publication has contributed to the advancement of the following goals:

#3 Good Health and Well-Being

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Collaboration types
Domestic collaboration
International collaboration
Web of Science research areas
Anesthesiology
Clinical Neurology
Neurosciences
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