ArticleNature communications2018
Brain and psychological determinants of placebo pill response in chronic pain patients.
Article in Nature communications, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 55 papers, 3 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
55 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Want to be fit? Start with your mind! The role of the placebo effect in physical fitness in children: a preliminary systematic review and meta-analysis.International journal of obesity (2005) · 2024Pooled it
- Impact of contextual factors on patient outcomes following conservative low back pain treatment: systematic review.Chiropractic & manual therapies · 2022Pooled it
- Meta-analysis of neural systems underlying placebo analgesia from individual participant fMRI data.Nature communications · 2021Pooled it
- Effect of acupuncture treatment for patients with knee osteoarthritis on brain fluctuation amplitude and functional connectivity: a randomized three-armed fMRI study.BMC complementary medicine and therapies · 2025Trial
- Discovery of the mechanisms of acupuncture in the treatment of migraine based on functional magnetic resonance imaging and omics.Frontiers of medicine · 2023Trial
- Presenting a sham treatment as personalised increases the placebo effect in a randomised controlled trial.eLife · 2023Trial
- Trial
- EEG-based clustering shows distinct separation of chronic pain patients before spinal cord stimulation surgery.NeuroImage · 2026Article
- Placebo analgesia persistence: evaluating behavioural stability in repeated trials.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Brain mechanisms of pain anticipation in chronic low back pain: Insights into phenotypical responses to mind-body therapy.The journal of pain · 2026Article
- Efficacy and Safety of Retention Enema with Traditional Chinese Medicine for Chronic Radiation-Induced Rectal Injury: Study Protocol for a Multicenter Randomized Controlled Trial.Complementary medicine research · 2026Article
- Advancing the Prediction and Understanding of Placebo Responses in Chronic Back Pain Using Large Language Models.European journal of pain (London, England) · 2026Article
- Turning Patients' Open-Ended Narratives of Chronic Pain Into Quantitative Measures: Natural Language Processing Study.JMIR human factors · 2025Article
- Clinical neuroscience and neurobiology of placebo and nocebo effects.International review of neurobiology · 2025Review
- About Distress in Chronic Pain Conditions: A Pre-Post Study on the Effectiveness of a Mindfulness-Based Intervention for Fibromyalgia and Low Back Pain Patients.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2024Article
- Differential neural activity predicts the long-term stability of the effects of positive and negative expectations on pain.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Explainable fNIRS-based pain decoding under pharmacological conditions via deep transfer learning approach.Neurophotonics · 2024Article
- Placebo treatment affects brain systems related to affective and cognitive processes, but not nociceptive pain.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Clinical Phenotypes Supporting the Relationship Between Sleep Disturbance and Impairment of Placebo Effects.The journal of pain · 2024Article
- Acupuncture-Related Therapy for Knee Osteoarthritis: A Narrative Review of Neuroimaging Studies.Journal of pain research · 2024Review
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.
Funding
Abstract
The placebo response is universally observed in clinical trials of pain treatments, yet the individual characteristics rendering a patient a 'placebo responder' remain unclear. Here, in chronic back pain patients, we demonstrate using MRI and fMRI that the response to placebo 'analgesic' pills depends on brain structure and function. Subcortical limbic volume asymmetry, sensorimotor cortical thickness, and functional coupling of prefrontal regions, anterior cingulate, and periaqueductal gray were predictive of response. These neural traits were present before exposure to the pill and most remained stable across treatment and washout periods. Further, psychological traits, including interoceptive awareness and openness, were also predictive of the magnitude of response. These results shed light on psychological, neuroanatomical, and neurophysiological principles determining placebo response in RCTs in chronic pain patients, and they suggest that the long-term beneficial effects of placebo, as observed in clinical settings, are partially predictable.
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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.