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Changes in Affective Pain Processing in Human Volunteers

NCT04280796 · Status: COMPLETED · Phase: NA · Type: INTERVENTIONAL · Enrollment: 183

Last updated 2023-11-21

No results posted yet for this study

Summary

The experience of pain is more than the conscious perception of nociceptive signals. Emotional and motivational aspects accompany pain, leading to its aversiveness and motivation for avoidance. In chronic pain, a negative hedonic shift has been proposed that is characterized by disproportionally increased emotional-motivational compared to sensory-discriminative pain responses. Such a negative hedonic shift is, for example, mirrored in very high comorbidity rates of chronic pain and affective disorders such as depression and anxiety. The aim of this study is to develop methods that allow the differentiation of sensory-discriminative and emotional-motivational pain response and to characterize mechanisms of the negative hedonic shift.

Conditions

  • Pain, Acute
  • Pain, Chronic
  • Low Back Pain

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

psychophysical tasks

All participants perform two psychophysical tasks to assess sensory-discriminative and emotional-motivational pain responses independently from each other. In addition, in Substudy 1 an operant learning paradigm will be implement to dissociate these responses, increasing the sensory-discriminative pain responses compared to emotional-motivational pain responses by contingent monetary reinforcement or vice versa. In Substudy 2, responses of chronic pain patients will be compared to those of healthy participants to characterize possible alterations and operant learning will be operationalized to decrease emotional-motivational pain responses, which are assumed to be already increased in the patients.

BEHAVIORAL

cognitive task

In Substudy 3 participants will perform a psychophysical task to assess metacognition in pain perception as an indicator of the cognitive-evaluative pain component.

Sponsors & Collaborators

  • SNSF

    collaborator UNKNOWN

  • susanne becker

    lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

  • Susanne Becker, PD Dr. · Balgrist Universitätsklinik

Study Design

Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Purpose
BASIC_SCIENCE
Masking
SINGLE
Model
CROSSOVER

Eligibility

Min Age
18 Years
Max Age
60 Years
Sex
ALL
Healthy Volunteers
Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2020-09-21
Primary Completion
2023-11-01
Completion
2023-11-01

Countries

  • Switzerland

Study Locations

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Read the full study record

This page highlights key information. For complete eligibility criteria, study locations, investigator contacts, and the full protocol, visit the original record on ClinicalTrials.gov.

View NCT04280796 on ClinicalTrials.gov