Trial reporteLife2018
The periaqueductal gray and Bayesian integration in placebo analgesia.
Trial report in eLife, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 56 papers, 1 of them a synthesis 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
56 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 109 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pooled it
- Placebo Effects Are Small on Average in the 7.5% CO2 Inhalational Model of Generalized Anxiety.The international journal of neuropsychopharmacology · 2024Trial
- Beyond Sharing Unpleasant Affect-Evidence for Pain-Specific Opioidergic Modulation of Empathy for Pain.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2021Trial
- Placebo and nocebo effects on pain through the lens of the predictive brain: Neurobiological mechanisms and translational implications.Experimental physiology · 2026Review
- Prediction, pain, and the power of context: toward a contemporary identity for the chiropractic profession.Chiropractic & manual therapies · 2026Review
- Placebo analgesia persistence: evaluating behavioural stability in repeated trials.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Brain network representations of placebo analgesia.Psychological medicine · 2026Article
- Review
- Temporal predictions shape somatosensory perception.Nature communications · 2026Article
- A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Patient Expectations in Individualised Anaesthesia and Analgesia: A Narrative Review and Future Directions.Journal of personalized medicine · 2026Review
- Social information creates self-fulfilling prophecies in judgments of pain, vicarious pain, and cognitive effort.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Placebo effect on brainstem activity associated with capsaicin-evoked urge to cough in healthy humans.The European respiratory journal · 2026Article
- Controllability changes pain perception by increasing the precision of expectations.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Dynamic learning of the meaning of information changes pain perception.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Conditioned Pain Modulation, Placebo and Offset Analgesia: Rates of Behavioural Expression of Inhibitory, Nonresponse and Facilitatory Pain Modulatory Effects.European journal of pain (London, England) · 2025Article
- Expectation generation and its effect on subsequent pain and visual perception.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- The causal role of brain circuits in osteoarthritis pain.Nature reviews. Rheumatology · 2025Review
- Neuropsychological mechanisms of observational learning in human placebo effects.Psychopharmacology · 2025Review
- Pain Expectation Effects Are Predicted by Emotion Rather Than Precision.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Convergent state-control of endogenous opioid analgesia.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
In placebo hypoalgesia research, the strength of treatment expectations and experiences are key components. However, the reliability or precision of expectations had been mostly ignored although being a likely source for interindividual differences. In the present study, we adopted a Bayesian framework, naturally combining expectation magnitudes and precisions. This postulates that expectations (prior) are integrated with incoming nociceptive information (likelihood) and both are weighted by their relative precision to form the pain percept and placebo effect. Sixty-two healthy subjects received heat pain during fMRI. Placebo effects were more pronounced in subjects with more precise treatment expectations and correlated positively with the relative precision of the prior expectation. Neural correlates of this precision were observed in the periaqueductal gray and the rostral ventromedial medulla, indicating that already at the level of the brainstem the precision of an expectation can influence pain perception presenting strong evidence for Bayesian integration in placebo hypoalgesia.
Indexed as
Identifiers
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.