Better understanding of the complex relationship between mind and body may provide new treatment strategies for chronic pain, say EU researchers. In a small room at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, a woman wearing a virtual reality headset is busy stacking virtual books onto a virtual bookcase. Every time she bends down, electrodes deliver a sharp zap of electricity to her lower back under the watchful eyes of a researcher tracking her performance, reactions and eye movements.
The unusual scene is part of a study being led by Dr. Dimitri Van Ryckeghem, Assistant Professor of experimental health psychology at the University of Maastricht. The researcher's aim is to unravel the complex relationship between attention processes, avoidance behavior and pain in an effort to determine how and why pain becomes chronic.
Attention bias In 2016, the University of Luxembourg received funding from the EU to explore how the relationship between mind and body can affect chronic pain. In the initial two-year study, called PainDynamics and coordinated by the University of Luxembourg, Van Ryckeghem and colleagues looked at the issue of attention bias, a natural tendency to focus on negative or pain-related information. While this had already been studied in a laboratory setting, they moved their research into the real world.
This let them dispel a number of assumptions which can help refine new therapeutic approaches. For a long time, researchers thought that people experiencing chron.
