European Journal of Pain
February 22, 2019
Marie‐Odile Krebs, Oussama Kébir, Thérèse M. Jay
56 citations
Cannabis use is consistently linked to persistent cognitive deficits and an elevated risk of schizophrenia-like psychoses, with the degree of risk influenced by dose, duration, age of first use, and genetic factors, including a partially shared genetic predisposition with schizophrenia. In healthy humans, THC produces transient, dose-dependent psychotic symptoms and cognitive effects that can be reduced by cannabidiol. Rodent studies confirm these findings and show that adolescent exposure leads to structural brain changes and impaired synaptic plasticity in fronto-limbic systems. Over-activation of the endocannabinoid system during adolescence may alter brain maturation, causing long-lasting changes. The assessment of medical cannabis must consider populations at higher risk for psychiatric and cognitive complications.
European Journal of Pain
April 20, 2020
Jelle Zorn, Oussama Abdoun, Romain Bouet et al.
55 citations
Mindfulness meditation reduces the unpleasantness of pain without lowering its perceived intensity, and this effect is stronger in expert meditators than in novices. In a cross-sectional study, participants practiced Open Monitoring meditation or attentional distraction while receiving thermal pain stimuli of varying duration. Meditation lowered unpleasantness ratings compared to distraction in both groups. Expert meditators reported less pain catastrophizing, showed a greater separation between sensory and affective pain processing during long stimuli, and this uncoupling carried over into the control condition. Higher pain catastrophizing scores predicted weaker sensory-affective uncoupling during long stimuli and higher pain intensity ratings during short stimuli. The findings indicate that mindfulness specifically targets the emotional dimension of pain and that pain catastrophizing interferes with this process.
European Journal of Pain
August 20, 2023
Mauro Cavarra, Amanda Feilding, Pamela Kryskow et al.
28 citations
A survey of people with chronic pain conditions found that, except for sciatica, those who used psychedelics (full doses or microdoses) reported better pain relief than with conventional medication. Full doses outperformed conventional medication for fibromyalgia, arthritis, migraine, and tension-type headache. Microdoses provided significantly better relief than conventional medication for migraines and comparable relief for the other conditions. The findings suggest that psychedelics may hold value for treating some chronic pain conditions.
European Journal of Pain
April 2, 2021
Stefano Poletti, Oussama Abdoun, Jelle Zorn et al.
25 citations
How people respond to pain depends on psychological mechanisms, beliefs, and expectations. Comparing 32 novices who received short meditation training with 30 experts (over 10,000 lifetime hours of meditation), five phenomenological clusters emerged from interviews describing pain response strategies: experiential avoidance-suppression, volitional agency-distanciation, positive cognitive reappraisal and flexibility, metacognitive insights about mental processes, and deconstructing suffering through insights while recognizing shared human suffering. Expert meditators predominantly populated the last two clusters. Each cluster correlated with a unique profile of self-reported pain intensity, unpleasantness, avoidance, openness, vividness, and blissfulness during an experimental thermal pain task. The findings suggest meditation expertise shapes the meaning and experience of pain through metacognitive mechanisms.