Placebo image change and long-term pain

picture:

what are you looking for

-I’m looking for pain and placebo. I want to understand what happens in the brain when people feel pain, and also investigate how the experience of pain is influenced by cognitive factors such as expectations. Functional MRI is my most important tool.

What did you discover?

– You participated and helped to start getting a good general picture of how placebos work. We now know that placebos can cause visible physical changes in the body and often account for a large portion of the treatment’s effect.

My most important contribution is that I have shown that placebo therapy is not an intellectual process as previously thought. Placebos also work through the lower structures of the brain, outside of our awareness. Therefore, it is effective in young children, people with intellectual disabilities, and elderly people with dementia.

In pain research, I have been part of a movement that has worked empirically to understand what happens when someone has chronic pain. We see that the central nervous system changes in many ways. He contributed to making so-called nociplastic pain an accepted medical concept today.

From now on, I want to know who is most at risk for long-term pain. For this purpose, we are building a large database that includes genetics, brain imaging, and more, where we will follow topics for a long time.

What do you hope your research will lead to?

– I believe that in the long term it will lead to new treatments for pain, and before that tools for diagnosing and preventing pain. I also hope that healthcare will want to use knowledge about placebos to shape patients’ expectations and achieve better treatment outcomes.

Text: Anders Nilsson
First published in English in the article “From Cell to Society 2023”