Pain Neuroscience Education and Neuroimaging-A Narrative Review

Abstract

Background: Musculoskeletal pain is a leading cause of medical visits, posing significant challenges both socially and economically, encouraging the scientific community to continue researching and exploring the most effective methods to address the problem. An alternative way to deal with chronic pain is pain neuroscience education (PNE), a lesson plan that addresses the neurobiology, neurophysiology, and nervous system processing of pain. This method takes the place of the conventional one, which connected pain to tissue damage or nociception.

Results: As a result, patients are taught that pain is often not a reliable measure of the health of the tissues but rather the outcome of the nervous system interpreting the injury in conjunction with additional psychosocial variables. In addition to finding research that examine, using neuroimaging, whether the administration of PNE has detectable effects at the level of the central nervous system, this narrative review seeks to clarify what PNE is, how it is administered, and if it is an effective treatment for musculoskeletal pain.

Conclusions: Based on the findings, it appears that PNE is more therapeutically beneficial when combined with therapeutic exercise, when done one-on-one, and during lengthy, frequent sessions. Lastly, even though PNE has no effect on the morphological properties of the gray matter, it appears to cause decreased activation of the regions linked to pain.

Keywords: PNE; neuroimaging; neurophysiology; neurosciences; pain.

Figure 1

Flowchart of the narrative review process.

Figure 2

Evidence from neuroimaging studies: (A) Basal Ganglia; (B) Right Dorsal Prefrontal Cortex; (C) Frontal Cortex; (D) Motor Cortex; (E) Anterior Cingulate Cortex.