Wolf Mehling, MD and Irina Strigo, PhD published two papers titled, "Mind your pain: A single-arm feasibility study to assess a smartphone-based interoceptive attention training for patients with chronic low back pain" and "Enhancing chronic low back pain management: an initial neuroimaging study of a mobile interoceptive attention training" evaluating a phone app-based attention training for patients with chronic low back pain. They showed that patients can change their common habitual coping style of ignoring their pain and distracting themselves from it. Patients were able to learn a rather different attention style that is precisely inquiring into the momentary phenomenological characteristics of the pain sensation itself, such as its feeling tone, shape, borders, density, movement, temperature, color, etc. After eight weeks of using this Mind-your-Pain app for about 2 minutes twice a day, more than two thirds of participants had at least a 30% reduction in their chronic pain. Assessed by task-based fMRI neuroimaging, patients that improved appeared to modify their response to experimental pain stimuli in the scanner and the underlying neural circuitry in key brain regions, including the insula, ventral anterior cingulate, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and nucleus accumbens. The findings suggest that applying mindful interoceptive attention to pain can aid in chronic back pain management, and that neural changes in interoception may serve as biomarkers for mind-body interventions in cLBP.
Listen to a conversation about these two publications, generated by Google LM Notebook: https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/51db149e-a229-4c46-ab74-551bbcf57da4/audio
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