ArticlePsychological medicine2026
Brain network representations of placebo analgesia.
Article in Psychological medicine, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Abstract
backgroundPrior neuroimaging studies and meta-analyses investigating brain correlates of placebo analgesia (PA) have yielded neuroanatomically heterogeneous findings, which may be reconciled from a connectomics perspective. The objective of this study was to examine network localization of brain functional alterations related to PA.
methodsWe initially identified PA-induced brain activation alterations (hyper-activation and hypo-activation separately) during experimental pain from 29 published studies with 674 individuals. By combining these implicated dysfunctional brain regions with large-scale discovery (N = 1113) and validation (N = 1093) resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging datasets, we then employed a novel functional connectivity network mapping approach to construct PA hyper-activation and hypo-activation networks, respectively.
resultsThe PA hyper-activation network manifested as a pattern of circumscribed brain regions mainly involving the limbic, default, and frontoparietal networks. By contrast, the PA hypo-activation network comprised a broadly distributed set of brain regions primarily implicating the ventral attention, somatomotor, and subcortical networks.
conclusionsOur findings regarding the brain network representations of PA may contribute to a deeper understanding of its action mechanisms and provide a neural framework that may inform future clinical translation.
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