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. 2025 Aug;46(8):3537-3545.
doi: 10.1007/s10072-025-08145-3. Epub 2025 Mar 29.

State of the art in EEG signal features of mindfulness-based treatments for chronic pain

D Duran  1 , P Arpaia  2 , G D'Errico  3 , L Grazzi  1 , P Lanteri  1 , N Moccaldi  4 , A Raggi  1 , R Robbio  4 , E Visani  1
Affiliations

State of the art in EEG signal features of mindfulness-based treatments for chronic pain

D Duran et al. Neurol Sci. 2025 Aug.

Abstract

A systematic review of electroencephalographic (EEG) correlates of Mindfulness- based treatment for chronic pain is presented. Recent technological advances have made EEG acquisition more accessible and also reliable. EEG monitoring before, during, and after treatment might support efficacy assessment and enable real- time adaptive intervention. The preliminary research extracted 131 papers from 6 scientific search engines. The application of the exclusion criteria led to the selection of 4 papers, indicating that the topic is still unexplored and further investigations are required. The collected papers exhibited great variability making challenging the comparison, nevertheless promising EEG correlates emerged. In particular, pain-related evoked potentials correlate with Mindfulness-Based treatment. EEG source analysis revealed the prevalent involvement of regions modulating emotional responses. In addition, higher baseline theta power was associated with greater improvement in depression when Mindfulness-based treatments are administered. This last result makes EEG also suitable for evaluating which patients can benefit most from mindfulness-based treatments.

Keywords: Chronic pain; Electroencephalography; Mindfulness; Non-pharmacological treatment.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declarations. Ethical approval: The manuscript titled “State of the Art in EEG Signal Features of Mindfulness-Based Treatments for Chronic Pain” is a literature review. No direct experiments on humans or animals were conducted by the authors in relation to this study. Therefore, no specific ethical approvals are required. Authors' declaration: The submitted work is original and has not been published elsewhere in any form or language, either partially or in full. The manuscript is not under consideration by any other journal for simultaneous publication. Proper acknowledgements to other works have been given, and no data, text, or theories by others are presented as if they were the authors' own. Quotation marks are used for verbatim copying of material, and permissions were secured for any copyrighted material. The results and discussions presented in this review are honest, clear, and without fabrication, falsification, or inappropriate data manipulation. Competing interests: Authors declare that they do not have financial or non-financial interests that are directly or indirectly related to the work submitted for publication.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
PRISMA flow diagram of selected studies
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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