Cognitive and emotional control of pain and its disruption in chronic pain

By M. Bushnell, Marta Čeko, L. Low. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2013

1,829 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Chronic pain is one of the most prevalent health problems in our modern world, with millions of people debilitated by conditions such as back pain, headache and arthritis. To address this growing problem, many people are turning to mind–body therapies, including meditation, yoga and cognitive behavioural therapy. This article will review the neural mechanisms underlying the modulation of pain by cognitive and emotional states — important components of mind–body therapies. It will also examine the accumulating evidence that chronic pain itself alters brain circuitry, including that involved in endogenous pain control, suggesting that controlling pain becomes increasingly difficult as pain becomes chronic.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, Physiology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/57d60377699533fc4fc147e13bc882e9b3eafc47

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Citations in the corpus

Ten simple rules for predictive modeling of individual differences in neuroimaging (2019, background): “In the context of pain-imaging research, for example, culture, ethnicity, and various psychological factors contribute to individual variability in the experience of pain (Borsook and Kalso, 2013; Bushnell et al., 2013; Davis et al., 2017), and such factors can present a challenge when attempting to”
Descending pain modulation and chronification of pain (2014, positive): “The somatosensory cortices (S1 and S2) and the insula are believed to encode the sensory features of pain, which include quality (stinging, burning or aching), location and duration [37,38 ■ ,39].”
EEG Spectral Analysis in Chronic Pain During Rest and Cognitive Reasoning (2025, unknown): “Selective attention to nociceptive signals can promote enhanced fast-band synchronization in sensorimotor areas, leading to preferential feedforward of pain-related information to downstream centers [14].”