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IMAGE: fMRI activity during pain is reduced in the areas shown in blue. Many of these are involved in constructing the experience of pain, including the feeling of suffering, and motivating. view more
Credit: Image provided by M.Zunhammer et al.
A large proportion of the benefit that a person gets from taking a real drug or receiving a treatment to alleviate pain is due to an individual s mindset, not to the drug itself. Understanding the neural mechanisms driving this placebo effect has been a longstanding question. A meta-analysis published in
Nature Communications finds that placebo treatments to reduce pain, known as placebo analgesia, reduce pain-related activity in multiple areas of the brain.
The neuroscience of placebo effects
A large proportion of the benefit that a person gets from taking a real drug or receiving a treatment to alleviate pain is due to an individual’s mindset, not to the drug itself. Understanding the neural mechanisms driving this placebo effect has been a longstanding question. A meta-analysis published in
Nature Communications finds that placebo treatments to reduce pain, known as placebo analgesia, reduce pain-related activity in multiple areas of the brain.
Previous studies of this kind have relied on small-scale studies, so until now, researchers did not know if the neural mechanisms underlying placebo effects observed to date would hold up across larger samples. This study represents the first large-scale mega-analysis, which looks at individual participants’ whole brain images. It enabled researchers to look at parts of the brain that they did not have sufficient resolution to look at in the past. The analysis was comprised of 20 neur