Mindfulness Meditation Could Have Direct Effect in Reducing Pain

November 4, 2024
Dennis Thompson HealthDay Reporter

Many people turn to mindfulness meditation to help them manage their chronic pain, a practice that’s been used for centuries.

However, it’s been an open question whether meditation is simply functioning as a placebo, rather than actually quelling pain.

Now, a new study involving brain scans has revealed that's not the case.

Mindfulness meditation engages distinct brain mechanisms to reduce pain, and those are not part of a placebo response, researchers reported.

“These two brain responses are completely distinct, which supports the use of mindfulness meditation as a direct intervention for chronic pain rather than as a way to engage the placebo effect,” said lead researcher Fadel Zeidan, a professor of anesthesiology with the University of California, San Diego.

For the study, researchers recruited 115 healthy people and randomly placed them into four different treatment groups:

An actual mindfulness meditation practice that involved focusing on breath without judgment
A sham meditation practice that only consisted of deep breathing
A placebo cream that patients were trained to believe reduce pain
A control group that listened to an audiobook

The team then applied a very painful but harmless heat stimulus to the back of every person’s leg and scanned their brains, to see how each responded to the pain.

Placebo cream and the sham medication practice both lowered pain, but mindfulness meditation was significantly more effective at reducing people’s pain, results showed.

The brain scans revealed that mindfulness medication reduced synchronization between brain areas involved in introspection, self-awareness and emotional regulation.

These parts of the brain comprise the Neural Pain Signal, a documented pattern of brain activity thought to be common among people experiencing different types of pain.

By contrast, the placebo cream and the sham meditation didn’t significantly change the NPS network compared to the placebo group, researchers found. Instead, they engaged entirely separate brain mechanisms with little overlap.

“It has long been assumed that the placebo effect overlaps with brain mechanisms triggered by active treatments, such as mindfulness meditation, but these results suggest that when it comes to pain, this may not be the case,” Zeidan said.

In modern medicine, new therapies are generally considered effective and reliable if they outperform placebo, the researchers noted.

This study, published recently in the journal Biological Psychiatry, was a good first step, but involved healthy people. The next step will be to test mindfulness meditation in people with chronic pain, to see if its effects hold.

“The mind is extremely powerful, and we’re still working to understand how it can be harnessed for pain management by studying the brain,” Zeidan said in a journal news release. “By separating pain from the self and relinquishing evaluative judgment, mindfulness meditation is able to directly modify how we experience pain in a way that uses no drugs, costs nothing and can be practiced anywhere.”

"Millions of people are living with chronic pain every day, and there may be more these people can do to reduce their pain and improve their quality of life than we previously understood,” Zeidan added. “We are excited to continue exploring the neurobiology of mindfulness and how we can leverage this ancient practice in the clinic.”

More information

The Mayo Clinic has more on mindfulness meditation for pain.

SOURCE: Elsevier, news release, Oct. 31, 2024

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