Neuronal correlates of pain controllability in chronic musculoskeletal pain patients

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Martin Diers
• Subject Area: Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology ; Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience
• Term: from 2016 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 324387905

The uncontrollability of repetitive pain attacks is one of the most restricting factors for life-quality in chronic pain patients. The influence of controllability on pain and the underlying modulating brain mechanisms are not known in chronic pain patients and have so far only been investigated in healthy controls (HC). But the understanding of the underlying brain mechanism involved in controllability of pain during experimental pain and its potential disturbance in chronic musculoskeletal pain patients (e.g. patients with fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS)) could help to improve chronic pain treatments. The knowledge of this mechanism could be used in future studies to test if cognitive behavioral approaches could retrieve this brain mechanism and if necessary adapt treatment approaches. As pain could be more salient in the FMS group compared to the HC, because of their learning history with pain, we will also measure controllability over an unpleasant tone, which will be adjusted as equal salient in both groups and has no learning history connected with it.We want to examine the effect of controllability on unpleasant auditory stimuli and pain perception and their neuronal correlates in 30 patients with FMS as well as 30 HC. Clinical characteristics for the description of the sample to ensure comparability with samples of existing publications (depression, anxiety, pain, catastrophizing, anxiety about pain, and locus of control) will be assessed by questionnaires. Auditory and painful stimuli will be applied under two conditions each: self-controlled (subjects themselves can stop the stimulation) and externally-controlled (subjects believe a computer stops the stimulation). The length of the stimulation will be parallelized and the order of appearance will be randomized. This design was previously shown to be effective in modulating controllability (Wiech et al. 2006).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants