Publications by authors named "Geert Crombez"

Background: Experience sampling methods typically involve multiple self-report assessments per day over consecutive days. Unlike traditional patient-reported outcome measures or interviews, such methods offer the possibility to capture the temporal fluctuations of experiences in daily environments, making them valuable for studying the daily lives of people with advanced illness. Yet, their use in palliative care research is limited.

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Purpose: Chronic pain is prevalent among breast cancer survivors. Bio-psychosocial factors interplay in its exacerbation and maintenance. Therefore, prevention and treatment require an interdisciplinary response and the integration of various approaches.

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There has been a rapid expansion in the quantity and complexity of data, information and knowledge created in the behavioural and social sciences, yet the field is not advancing understanding, practice or policy to the extent that the insights warrant. One challenge is that research often progresses in disciplinary silos and is reported using inconsistent and ambiguous terminology. This makes it difficult to integrate and aggregate findings to produce cumulative bodies of knowledge that can be translated to applied settings.

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Introduction: Personalising recommendations for physical activity coping plans can help bridging the physical activity intention-behaviour gap. Data-driven 'black-box' approaches result in recommendations that prove difficult to explain, and may have undesired consequences. This study aimed to explicitly link barriers and coping strategies using end-user input.

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Article Synopsis
  • * Critical issues in research include poor governance, lack of diversity, inadequate stakeholder engagement, and issues with data transparency and reporting, which can lead to misguided clinical practices and low value care.
  • * The article proposes the ENTRUST-PE framework to enhance the reliability of pain research, aiming to build trust among stakeholders and calling for collective action to improve the quality and outcomes of pain science.
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Background: The experience sampling method (ESM), a self-report method that typically uses multiple assessments per day, can provide detailed knowledge of the daily experiences of people with cancer, potentially informing oncological care. The use of the ESM among people with advanced cancer is limited, and no validated ESM questionnaires have been developed specifically for oncology.

Objective: This study aims to develop, content validate, and optimize the digital Experience Sampling Method for People Living With Advanced Cancer (ESM-AC) questionnaire, covering multidimensional domains and contextual factors.

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  • The study explored genetic links to neuropathic pain by comparing individuals with the condition to those who had injuries but did not experience neuropathic pain.
  • Key findings included significant associations with the KCNT2 gene and pain intensity, as well as other genes like LHX8 and TCF7L2 connected to neuropathic pain.
  • The research also highlighted the influence of polygenic risk scores related to depression and inflammation on neuropathic pain, while discovering novel genetic variants tied to specific sensory profiles.
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Nocebo effects in pain (nocebo hyperalgesia) have received significant attention recently, with negative expectancies and anxiety proposed to be explanatory factors. While both expectancy and anxiety can bias attention, attention has been rarely explored as a potential mechanism involved in nocebo hyperalgesia. The present study aimed to explore whether attention bias modification (ABM) using an immersive, ecologically valid VR paradigm successfully induced attention biases (AB) and subsequently influenced nocebo hyperalgesia.

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  • Causal directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) are useful tools for visually representing causal relationships, but are underutilized in psychology despite their benefits in study design and analysis.
  • A scoping review identified guidelines from 11 sources on developing DAGs, highlighting variations in handling confounding variables and the integration of domain knowledge.
  • The paper offers key recommendations for effective DAG development, supported by an illustrative example to enhance practical understanding.
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  • The study investigates the reasons behind why some patients experience painful polyneuropathy while others do not, utilizing data from 1181 patients in the DOLORISK database.
  • Researchers used multivariate logistic regression and machine learning to identify key factors related to painful neuropathy, including severity of neuropathy, family history of chronic pain, fatigue, depression scores, and pain-related worrying.
  • The findings suggest that emotional and clinical factors play a significant role in the development of painful neuropathy, with predictive models achieving over 76% accuracy, which could help in identifying patients at risk in the future.
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The attentional bias literature has consistently failed to take context into account. We developed a novel paradigm in immersive virtual reality (VR) with pain stimuli where it would be adaptive or nonadaptive to attend to the stimuli. Participants had to indicate the location of the stimuli.

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Attention biases towards disease-relevant cues have been implicated in numerous disorders and health conditions, such as anxiety, cancer, drug-use disorders, and chronic pain. Attention bias modification (ABM) has shown that changing attention biases can change related emotional processes. ABM most commonly uses a modified dot-probe task, which has received increasing criticism regarding its reliability and inconsistent findings.

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Background: Digital interventions are a promising avenue to promote physical activity in healthy adults. Current practices recommend to include end-users early on in the development process. This study focuses on the wishes and needs of users regarding an a mobile health (mHealth) application that promotes physical activity in healthy adults, and on the differences between participants who do or do not meet the World Health Organization's recommendation of an equivalent of 150 minutes of moderate intensity physical activity.

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Introduction: People with advanced cancer can experience a wide range of multidimensional symptoms or concerns, but little is known about when and how these fluctuate in daily life. Experience sampling methods (ESMs) involve repeated self-reports in people's natural contexts aimed at uncovering everyday life experiences. ESM has limited recall bias and good ecological validity but might be burdensome to patients.

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Fillingim RB. Redefining sensitization could be a sensitive issue. PAIN Rep 2024;9:e1126.

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We define narrative bias as a tendency to interpret information as part of a larger story or pattern, regardless of whether the facts support the full narrative. Narrative bias in title and abstract means that results reported in the title and abstract of an article are done so in a way that could distort their interpretation and mislead readers who had not read the whole article. Narrative bias is often referred to as "spin.

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Background: There is a need for physical activity promotion interventions in adolescents and young adults with intellectual disabilities. Current interventions have shown limited effectiveness, which may be attributed to the absence of theory and a population-specific development. Combining a planning model (including theory) and cocreation with the target audience during intervention development could potentially address this gap.

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Background: A healthy lifestyle may improve mental health. It is yet not known whether and how a mobile intervention can be of help in achieving this in adolescents. This study investigated the effectiveness and perceived underlying mechanisms of the mobile health (mHealth) intervention #LIFEGOALS to promote healthy lifestyles and mental health.

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Many gaps remain in finding effective, safe, and equitable treatments for children and adolescents with chronic pain and in accessing treatments in different settings. A major goal of the field is to improve assessment of pain and related experience. Valid and reliable patient-reported outcome measures are critical for advancing knowledge of clinical interventions for pediatric chronic pain.

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Background: When trying to be more physically active, preparing for possible barriers by considering potential coping strategies increases the likelihood of plan enactment. Digital interventions can support this process by providing personalized recommendations for coping strategies, but this requires that possible coping strategies are identified and classified. Existing classification systems of behavior change, such as the compendium of self-enactable techniques, may be reused to classify coping strategies in the context of physical activity (PA) coping planning.

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Article Synopsis
  • Big data and machine learning can help us understand how psychological factors affect pain, but we need really good data to do this correctly.
  • There are challenges with current evidence about how these factors influence chronic pain, so improvements are needed.
  • Researchers should be clearer about how they think causes and effects work, which can help design better studies and lead to more useful results.
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