Pain
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Implicit associations between pain and self-schema in patients with chronic pain.
Chronic pain often interferes with daily functioning, and may become a threat to an individual's sense of self. Despite the development of a recent theoretical account focussing upon the relationship between the presence of chronic pain and a person's self, research investigating this idea is limited. In the present study we aimed to (1) compare the strength of association between self- and pain schema in patients with chronic pain and healthy control subjects and (2) research whether the strength of association between self- and pain-schema is related to particular pain-related outcomes and individual differences of patients with chronic pain. ⋯ Results indicated that the pain- and self-schema were more strongly associated in patients with chronic pain than in healthy control subjects. Second, results indicated that, in patients with chronic pain, a stronger association between self- and pain-schema, as measured with the IAT, is related to a heightened level of pain severity, pain suffering, anxiety, and helplessness. Current findings give first support for the use of an IAT to investigate the strength of association between self- and pain-schema in patients with chronic pain and suggest that pain therapies may incorporate techniques that intervene on the level of self-pain enmeshment.
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Clinical Trial
Temporal stability of conditioned pain modulation in healthy women over four menstrual cycles at the follicular and luteal phases.
Conditioned pain modulation (CPM) is a phenomenon that may be tested with a dynamic quantitative sensory test that assesses the inhibitory aspect of this pain modulatory network. Although CPM has been adopted as a clinical assessment tool in recent years, the stability of the measure has not been determined over long time intervals. The question of stability over time is crucial to our understanding of pain processing, and critical for the use of this tool as a clinical test. ⋯ The intraclass correlation coefficient for the CPM effect was modest (0.39; CI = 0.23-0.59), suggesting that there is significant variation in CPM over long time intervals. CPM did not vary across phases in the menstrual cycle. Prior to the adoption of CPM as a clinical tool to predict individual risk and aid diagnosis, additional research is needed to establish the measurement properties of CPM paradigms and evaluate factors that influence CPM effects.