2018

Chronic pain is a prevalent condition that causes functional impairment and emotional suffering. To allay pain-induced suffering, opioids are often prescribed for chronic pain management. Yet, chronic pain patients on opioid therapy are at heightened risk for opioid misuse—behaviors that can lead to addiction and overdose. Relatedly, chronic pain patients are at elevated risk for suicidal ideation and suicidal behaviors.

Chronic pain is a prevalent condition that causes functional impairment and emotional suffering. To allay pain-induced suffering, opioids are often prescribed for chronic pain management.

A subset of chronic pain patients misuse prescription opioids as a means of regulating negative emotions. However, opioid misuse may result in deficits in emotion regulation strategies like reappraisal by virtue of the deleterious effects of chronic opioid exposure.

In this study, the authors utilized a novel psychophysiological probe of pain-opioid conditioned associations, the cue-primed reactivity (CPR) task, to assess associative learning and second-order conditioning effects among chronic pain patients taking long-term opioid analgesics.

Although opioid-treated chronic pain patients evidence blunted responsiveness to natural rewards, focusing on naturally rewarding stimuli can produce analgesia in these patients. A prior randomized controlled trial (RCT) demonstrated that a social work intervention—Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE)...