La meditación podría reducir el dolor

Un estudio publicado en la revista Pain muestra que la práctica de meditación de forma rutinaria puede reducir el dolor. Los hallazgos muestran que solo los individuos que habían realizado mediatación durante un largo período de tiempo presentaban una reducción del dolor.
En el estudio se incluyeron prácticas de meditación reflexiva y atenta, que forman la base de la terapia cognitiva recomendada para la depresión recurrente. Mediante el uso de un láser para inducir dolor, los autores observaron que la actividad de ciertas partes del cerebro parecía disminuir cuando los participantes del estudio se anticipaban al dolor.las personas con más de 35 años de experiencia en meditación eran las que menos se anticipaban al dolo y lo sufrían menosr. En particular, los meditadores también parecían mostrar una actividad inusual en la región de la corteza prefrontal del cerebro, la que regula los procesos de atención y pensamiento cuando una persona se siente amenazada.

Meditation experience predicts less negative appraisal of pain: Electrophysiological evidence for the involvement of anticipatory neural responses.
Brown CA, Jones AK.
Human Pain Research Group, University of Manchester, Clinical Sciences Building, Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust, Salford M6 8HD, UK.
Abstract
The aim of mindfulness meditation is to develop present-focused, non-judgmental, attention. Therefore, experience in meditation should be associated with less anticipation and negative appraisal of pain. In this study we compared a group of individuals with meditation experience to a control group to test whether any differences in the affective appraisal of pain could be explained by lower anticipatory neural processing. Anticipatory and pain-evoked ERPs and reported pain unpleasantness were recorded in response to laser stimuli of matched subjective intensity between the two groups. ERP data were analysed after source estimation with LORETA. No group effects were found on the laser energies used to induce pain. More experienced meditators perceived the pain as less unpleasant relative to controls, with meditation experience correlating inversely with unpleasantness ratings. ERP source data for anticipation showed that in meditators, lower activity in midcingulate cortex relative to controls was related to the lower unpleasantness ratings, and was predicted by lifetime meditation experience. Meditators also reversed the normal positive correlation between medial prefrontal cortical activity and pain unpleasantness during anticipation. Meditation was also associated with lower activity in S2 and insula during the pain-evoked response, although the experiment could not disambiguate this activity from the preceding anticipation response. Our data is consistent with the hypothesis that meditation reduces the anticipation and negative appraisal of pain, but effects on pain-evoked activity are less clear and may originate from preceding anticipatory activity. Further work is required to directly test the causal relationship between meditation, pain anticipation, and pain experience.

Copyright © 2010 International Association for the Study of Pain. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.