PAID · PAInful Decisions - How chronic pain affects daily decision-making

PAInful Decisions - How chronic pain affects daily decision-making

Fibromyalgia (FM) is a chronic pain syndrome characterized by widespread pain, multiple tender points, fatigue, and impaired mental functioning. Best practice interventions for chronic pain typically include effortful exercise and long-term treatment – i.e., interventions that involve short-term costs (effort) with delayed benefit (improved pain and function). Problematically, adherence to these treatments is often low. While low adherence has typically been assumed to be due to low motivation, it is also possible that people with chronic pain may have altered decision-making related to delayed and effortful rewards. Understanding if long-term pain influences decision-making, what aspects of long-term pain contribute most to decision-making (e.g., emotional versus physical), and the neural underpinnings of these contributors, are essential given the clear relevance of altered decision-making to the adherence to evidence-based management strategies. Such knowledge could inform the development of novel interventions for FM. The PAInful Decisions (PAID) project addresses these critical aspects by evaluating delay and effort attitudes in those experiencing FM and in a group of age- and sex-matched pain-free controls. Additionally, it investigates the unique role of emotions and bodily sensation perception as potential contributing factors to altered decision-making involving delayed and effortful gratification. PAID is a highly innovative and interdisciplinary project, integrating approaches from experimental psychology, behavioural economics, clinical practice, psychophysiology, and neuroimaging. This way, it comprehensively investigates the role of body-brain interactions in the context of chronic pain. Such a systematic, selective, and interdisciplinary approach to study decision-making in chronic pain is a considerable research challenge, yet the results have an essential meaning for patients’ lives and clinical practice, offering to move basic and applied science forward. The project’s scientific impact lies in contributing new scientific insights regarding the impact of chronic pain in decision-making in FM with interdisciplinary and multimodal approaches; generating an open-source database. The expected economic impact is in providing insights into better uptake, improved retention and adherence to interventions that are cornerstone to chronic pain management. Additionally, by disseminating the research outcomes widely, i.e., not only via scientific conferences and papers but also by targeting clinical audiences (patients and their families) as well as healthcare professionals, we will raise awareness of potential decision-making issues faced by patients with chronic pain.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз