Achtsamkeitsmeditation reduziert die Schmerzintensität

Fulltext

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/31/14/5540.full.pdf

Abstract

The subjective experience of one’s environment is constructed by interactions among sensory, cognitive, and affective processes. For
centuries, meditation has been thought to influence such processes by enabling a nonevaluative representation of sensory events. To
better understand how meditation influences the sensory experience, we used arterial spin labeling functional magnetic resonance
imaging to assess the neural mechanisms by which mindfulness meditation influences pain in healthy human participants. After 4 d of
mindfulness meditation training, meditating in the presence of noxious stimulation significantly reduced pain unpleasantness by 57%
and pain intensity ratings by 40% when compared to rest. A two-factor repeated-measures ANOVA was used to identify interactions
between meditation and pain-related brain activation. Meditation reduced pain-related activation of the contralateral primary somatosensory
cortex. Multiple regression analysis was used to identify brain regions associated with individual differences in the magnitude of
meditation-related pain reductions. Meditation-induced reductions in pain intensity ratings were associated with increased activity in
the anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula, areas involved in the cognitive regulation of nociceptive processing. Reductions in pain
unpleasantness ratings were associated with orbitofrontal cortex activation, an area implicated in reframing the contextual evaluation of
sensory events. Moreover, reductions in pain unpleasantness also were associated with thalamic deactivation, which may reflect a limbic
gating mechanism involved in modifying interactions between afferent input and executive-order brain areas. Together, these data
indicate that meditation engages multiple brain mechanisms that alter the construction of the subjectively available pain experience from
afferent information.