ArticlePain2015
Neuromodulation of conditioned placebo/nocebo in heat pain: anodal vs cathodal transcranial direct current stimulation to the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
Article in Pain, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 31 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
31 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 61 citations in OpenAlex.
- Neural correlates of co-occurring pain and depression: an activation-likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis and systematic review.Translational psychiatry · 2022Pooled it
- Is transcranial direct current stimulation beneficial for treating pain, depression, and anxiety symptoms in patients with chronic pain? A systematic review and meta-analysis.Frontiers in molecular neuroscience · 2022Pooled it
- Independent effects of transcranial direct current stimulation and social influence on pain.Pain · 2025Trial
- Trial
- No effects of transcranial direct current stimulation on visual evoked potential and peak gamma frequency.Cognitive processing · 2022Trial
- Manipulating placebo analgesia and nocebo hyperalgesia by changing brain excitability.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Trial
- Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) over the Left Dorsal Lateral Prefrontal Cortex in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).Neural plasticity · 2021Trial
- Trial
- Enhancing treatment of osteoarthritis knee pain by boosting expectancy: A functional neuroimaging study.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2018Trial
- Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) Targeting Left Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex Modulates Task-Induced Acute Pain in Healthy Volunteers.Pain medicine (Malden, Mass.) · 2016Trial
- Effects of prefrontal transcranial direct current stimulation on open-label placebo responses.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Premovement activity in the corticospinal tract is amplified by the placebo effect: an active inference account.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- The Placebo Hypoalgesic Response Is Reduced in Healthy Older Adults Showing a Decline in Executive Functioning.Journal of pain research · 2025Article
- Article
- When knowledge hurts: humans are willing to receive pain for obtaining non-instrumental information.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Targeting neural correlates of placebo effects.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2023Review
- Placebo and nocebo effects: from observation to harnessing and clinical application.Translational psychiatry · 2022Review
- A randomized pharmacological fMRI trial investigating D-cycloserine and brain plasticity mechanisms in learned pain responses.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex sensing analgesia.Biophysics and physicobiology · 2022Article
- Young female participants show blunted placebo effects associated with blunted responses to a cue predicting a safe stimulus in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Placebo and nocebo play an important role in clinical practice and medical research. Modulating placebo/nocebo responses using noninvasive brain stimulation methods, such as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), has the potential to harness these effects to therapeutic benefit in a clinical setting. In this study, we assessed the effect of anodal and cathodal tDCS over the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (rDLPFC) on conditioned placebo/nocebo cue response to heat pain. Two matched groups of healthy volunteers were subjected to an identical session of conditioning, during which low and high cues (abstract images) were associated with low and high pain levels, respectively. Twenty-minute 2-mA tDCS (either anodal or cathodal) over the rDLPFC was applied. The influence of tDCS current polarity (anodal vs cathodal) on placebo and nocebo was assessed, using subjects' pain ratings in response to identical pain preceded by the conditioned high or low cues. The duration of cue presentation varied to allow either fully conscious or subliminal processing. Significant placebo and nocebo effects in the anodal but not the cathodal group were elicited with the conditioning paradigm. This study provides evidence of a possibility to modulate the conditioned placebo and nocebo effect by changing the excitability of the rDLPFC using tDCS.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.