Mindfulness meditation reduces pain says new study in leading journal

Mindfulness meditation reduces pain more effectively than placebo, outlines research published in the Journal of Neuroscience. And brain scans showed that mindfulness meditation produced very different patterns of activity than those produced by placebo to reduce pain.
“We were completely surprised by the findings,” says Dr Fadel Zeidan, lead investigator. “While we thought that there would be some overlap in brain regions between meditation and placebo, the findings from this study provide novel and objective evidence that mindfulness meditation reduces pain in a unique fashion.”

A total of 75 healthy, pain-free people were split into groups: mindfulness meditation; pretend meditation; pretend pain relief cream; or control.

Pain was induced by using a probe to heat a small area of the participants’ skin to 49 deg-C, a level of heat most people find very painful. The volunteers then rated pain intensity (ie the physical reaction) and pain unpleasantness (ie the emotional reaction). Their brains were scanned before and after the four-day group interventions.

Key findings:

• The mindfulness meditation group reported that pain intensity was reduced by 27% and by 44% for the emotional aspect of pain;
• The placebo cream reduced the sensation of pain by 11% and emotional aspect of pain by 13%;
• The placebo-meditation group decreased pain intensity by 9% and pain unpleasantness by 24%.

The scans showed that mindfulness meditation reduced pain by activating areas of the brain associated with the self-control of pain. The placebo cream lowered pain by reducing brain activity in pain-processing areas.

“The MRI scans showed for the first time that mindfulness meditation produced patterns of brain activity that are different than those produced by the placebo cream,” Dr Zeidan says.

Another brain region (the thalamus) was deactivated during mindfulness meditation, but was activated during all other conditions. This brain region acts as a gateway that determines if sensory information is allowed to reach higher brain centres, so by deactivating it, mindfulness meditation may have caused signals about pain to simply fade away, the research group says.

Pretend meditation may have reduced pain through relaxation due to slower breathing.

“This study is the first to show that mindfulness meditation is mechanistically distinct and produces pain relief above and beyond the analgesic effects seen with either placebo cream or sham meditation,” Dr Zeidan says.

“Based on our findings, we believe that as little as four 20-minute daily sessions of mindfulness meditation could enhance pain treatment in a clinical setting. However, given that the present study examined healthy, pain-free volunteers, we cannot generalize our findings to chronic pain patients at this time.”

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Image credit: Caleb Roenigk