MedTrace Logo

Increased Emotional-motivational Processing in Patients with Chronic Pain and Its Neural Correlates

NCT05257356 · Status: COMPLETED · Phase: NA · Type: INTERVENTIONAL · Enrollment: 138

Last updated 2025-02-11

No results posted yet for this study

Summary

Chronic pain causes immense suffering and reductions in quality of life as well as enormous socioeconomic costs. Very many chronic pain patients fall into the category of unspecific pain, i.e. pain without clear medical explanation, with lacking effective treatments. It is assumed that a negative hedonic shift, characterized by excessive emotional-motivational processing and neg-ative affect, contributes causally to the development and maintenance of chronic pain. The mechanisms leading to such a shift are largely unclear; however, learning mechanisms appear likely candidates, possibly causing decreased connectivity in the fronto-striatal brain circuits. The project's over-all aim is to characterize mechanisms of emotional-motivational pain pro-cessing. The specific objectives are to illustrate that emotional-motivational pain components are heightened in chronic pain and that they can be de-creased by counterconditioning as an important and pervasive mechanisms in everyday life. Furthermore, its neural correlates in fronto-striatal networks underlying the conditioning effects will be characterized.

Conditions

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

psychophysical tasks

Substudy 1(b): All participants will perform one psychophysical task to assess sensory-discriminative and emotional-motivational pain responses simultaneously. The responses and the reaction times of chronic pain patients will be compared to those of healthy participants to characterize possible alterations in the patients (Substudy 1). Associative learning by monetary reinforcement will be implemented to diminish the aversiveness of the pain, which is assumed to be already increased in the patients. Substudy 2: As in Substudy 1, all participants will perform one psychophysical task to assess sensory-discriminative and emotional-motivational pain responses simultaneously combined with MRI assessing the effects of the counterconditioning on fronto-striatal circuits.

Sponsors & Collaborators

  • SNSF

    collaborator UNKNOWN

  • susanne becker

    lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

  • Susanne Becker, Dr. Prof. · Balgrist Universitätsklinik

Study Design

Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Purpose
BASIC_SCIENCE
Masking
SINGLE
Model
CROSSOVER

Eligibility

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

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2022-04-06
Primary Completion
2024-04-05
Completion
2024-04-05

Countries

  • Switzerland

Study Locations

More Related Trials

Entities

Diseases

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 NCT05257356 on ClinicalTrials.gov