Evaluating perspectives of pain: Stratifying cognitive interventions
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Understanding and improving the stratification of psychological interventions for chronic pain patients.
IRAS ID
279002
Contact name
Emma Borg
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Reading
Duration of Study in the UK
3 years, 0 months, 0 days
Research summary
The study will be a preliminary investigation of the relationship between chronic pain patients’ beliefs about pain and their outcomes from psychological treatment. Chronic pain is a debilitating condition, affecting up to half of the UK population, and carries social and economic costs estimated at £32bn annually. Surgical and pharmacological interventions often have poor results, while psychological treatments like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) can prove more effective for some sufferers. Building on earlier theoretical work investigating how people ordinarily think about pain, we will investigate whether the effectiveness of CBT for chronic pain patients depends on their beliefs about pain. We will work with patients offered a course of group-based CBT at either the Royal Berkshire Hospital’s Pain Management Unit, or the Finchampstead surgery within the IPASS network. Prior to their beginning the course, we will assess whether the patients tend to think about pain as essentially a property of the body, or essentially a property of conscious mental experience. According to the (‘polyeidic’) theory of pain developed by members of the project team based at the University of Reading, individuals’ beliefs about pain may vary along the body-mind dimension, with some people having a more ‘body-centric’ conception of pain, while others have a more ‘mind-centric’ conception. We will analyse how patients’ beliefs about pain along this dimension relate to their subsequent outcomes from the course of CBT. It may be, for example, that those who think of pain in a more mind-centric way are more likely to continue with, and benefit from, this treatment. Once this first phase of work is successfully implemented, we hope to progress to a second phase, in which we will investigate whether patients’ outcomes from CBT can be improved by encouraging them to focus on the mental/ experiential aspects of pain.
REC name
East Midlands - Leicester Central Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
20/EM/0174
Date of REC Opinion
8 Jul 2020
REC opinion
Unfavourable Opinion