The role of spontaneous vs. experimentally induced attentional strategies for the pain response to a single bout of exercise in healthy individuals.

Objectives: Exercise-induced pain and exercise-induced hypoalgesia (EIH) are well described phenomena involving physiological and cognitive mechanisms. Two experiments explored whether spontaneous and instructed mindful monitoring (MM) were associated with reduced exercise-induced pain and unpleasantness, and increased EIH compared with spontaneous and instructed thought suppression (TS) in pain-free individuals.

Methods: Eighty pain-free individuals participated in one of two randomized crossover experiments.

Pain and executive function: no association between remote exercise-induced hypoalgesia and cognitive inhibition in pain-free participants.

Objectives: Cognitive inhibition, which denotes the ability to suppress predominant or automatic responses, has been associated with lower pain sensitivity and larger conditioned pain modulation in humans. Studies exploring the association between cognitive inhibition and other pain inhibitory phenomena, like exercise-induced hypoalgesia (EIH), are scarce. The primary aim was to explore the association between cognitive inhibition and EIH at exercising (local) and non-exercising (remote) muscles after isometric exercise.

Psychosocial subgroups in high-performance athletes with low back pain: eustress-endurance is most frequent, distress-endurance most problematic!

Objectives: In non-athletes, fear-avoidance and endurance-related pain responses appear to influence the development and maintenance of low back pain (LBP). The avoidance-endurance model (AEM) postulates three dysfunctional pain response patterns that are associated with poorer pain outcomes. Whether comparable relationships are present in athletes is currently unclear.

Endogenous Modulation of Pain: The Role of Exercise, Stress, and Cognitions in Humans.

Background: Pain is a complex and highly subjective phenomenon that can be modulated by several factors. On the basis of results from experimental and clinical studies, the existence of endogenous pain modulatory mechanisms that can increase or diminish the experience of pain is now accepted.

Methods: In this narrative review, the pain modulatory effects of exercise, stress, and cognitions in humans are assessed.

Psychological pain responses in athletes and non-athletes with low back pain: Avoidance and endurance matter.

Background: Dysfunctional psychological pain responses, namely fear-avoidance (FAR), including catastrophizing and helplessness, as well as endurance-related responses (ER), including thought suppression and overactivity, have been shown to be risk factors for persistent low back pain (LBP). Literature suggests that athletes may differ from non-athletes regarding psychological responses to pain.

Objectives: This study set out to compare FAR and ER between athletes and non-athletes with LBP.

Assessing Endogenous Pain Inhibition: Test-Retest Reliability of Exercise-Induced Hypoalgesia in Local and Remote Body Parts After Aerobic Cycling.

Objective: Acute exercise can trigger a hypoalgesic response (exercise-induced hypoalgesia [EIH]) in healthy subjects. Despite promising application possibilities of EIH in the clinical context, its reliability has not been sufficiently examined. This study therefore investigated the between-session and within-subject test-retest reliability of EIH at local and remote body parts after aerobic cycling at a heart rate-controlled intensity.

Cognitive Biases Toward Pain: Implications for a Neurocognitive Processing Perspective in Chronic Pain and its Interaction With Depression.

Objectives: Information-processing biases such as attentional, interpretation, and memory biases are supposed to play a role in the exacerbation and maintenance of chronic pain. Current research in the area of cognitive biases shows that all these biases seem to have an influence on attention to, interpretation of, and recall of pain and can lead to maladaptive strategies and the exacerbation of pain.

Methods: We conducted a narrative literature review, considering evidence extracted from various databases including PubMed, MEDLINE, Science Direct, and ProQuest.

Exercise does not produce hypoalgesia when performed immediately after a painful stimulus.

Background And Aims: Exercise-induced hypoalgesia (EIH) and conditioned pain modulation (CPM) are assumed to reflect descending pain inhibition. Potential interactions between EIH and CPM may be important in the therapy of chronic pain, as reduced CPM and increased pain after exercise are frequently observed. This study compared the EIH response after CPM was activated using a cold pressor task with the EIH response after a control condition.

Isometric Back Exercise Has Different Effect on Pressure Pain Thresholds in Healthy Men and Women.

Objective: Isometric exercises produce an acute decrease in the pain sensitivity, known as exercise-induced hypoalgesia (EIH). Existing EIH paradigms use exercises at the extremities with more pronounced EIH at local compared to remote body sites, indicating local inhibition in addition to central inhibitory mechanisms. So far the results on EIH in patients with low back pain (LBP) are equivocal and no studies have investigated an EIH paradigm targeting the lower back in order to assess EIH in patients with LBP.