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News: Dr. Garland’s Biobehavioral Research on MORE and Mindful Savoring Highlighted by the National Institute on Drug Abuse

MORE Reward ERPI recently learned that my research on Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE) was highlighted on the National Institute on Drug Abuse website. The NIDA news story, entitled “Mindfulness training may reduce deficits in natural reward processing during chronic pain or drug addiction” details a study I conducted with my colleagues Brett Froeliger (Neuroscience, Medical University of South Carolina) and Matthew Howard (Social Work, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) that was published in April in the Journal of Behavioral Medicine. According to the excellent summary of this research on the NIDA website,

“Drug-dependent people show decreased behavioral and brain reactivity to natural rewards compared to non-drug users. As a result, drug-dependent users increasingly focus their attention on obtaining the drug instead of attending to natural rewards.  Recent research shows that a cognitive-based intervention may help restore natural reward processing in opioid-dependent participants.

In this study, chronic pain patients at risk for opioid misuse were randomized to either eight weeks of a Mindfulness-Oriented tetonsRecovery Enhancement (MORE) intervention or to an eight-week support group (control). Participants in the MORE intervention used mindfulness meditation to focus on all sensory features of a pleasant experience or object (for example, a beautiful nature scene like a sunset), while reflecting on any positive emotions arising in response to the pleasant event. The support group discussed topics and emotions related to chronic pain and opioid use/misuse. Following these interventions, all participants were shown images representing natural rewards (such as endearing animals, appealing foods, landscapes) or neutral images (furniture, neutral facial expressions, or household items). Researchers measured late positive potential (LPP) brain activity, which reflects attention to emotionally salient information, while participants viewed these images. In comparison to the control group, participants completing the MORE intervention showed greater LPP responses to natural reward images relative to neutral images and greater the LPP responses predicted reduced opioid cravings as reported by the participants.”

These results suggest that teaching people who misuse opioids to mindfully attend to positive aspects of their life may increase the perceived value of natural rewards – processes that may be diminished in those facing chronic pain or addiction – which may in turn help them to control opioid cravings.”

It is thrilling to see that this line of research is making a positive impact on the scientific community, and of course, the ultimate aim of this work is to alleviate human suffering.

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New Paper Accepted for Publication – Opioid Attentional Bias and Cue-Elicited Craving Predict Future Risk of Prescription Opioid Misuse

opioid_probe Today I had a new paper accepted for publication in the prestigious addictions journal, Drug and Alcohol Dependence. This paper, coauthored with my colleague Matthew Howard, describes new findings from a randomized controlled trial of Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement for chronic pain patients prescribed long-term opioid painkillers. The new findings demonstrate that the extent to which an individual finds his or her attention automatically captured by opioid-related images (e.g., the image of an opioid pill bottle) significantly predicts whether they will misuse opioids 20 WEEKS LATER after completing treatment.

Before patients participated in the research treatments, they completed a dot probe task in which they were shown two pictures (displayed either for 200 ms, or 2000 ms), side by side, on a computer screen, and were asked to “choose the side with the dot” by clicking a button on a keypad. The computer recorded their reaction times down to the millisecond. We found that compared to people who did not misuse opioids at follow-up, people who ended up misusing opioids 3 months after completing treatment were significantly faster to choose the side with the dot when the dot replaced an opioid photo than when it replaced a neutral photo.  This reaction time difference indicated that their attention was captivated by opioids. This effect was evident for cues presented for 200 ms (that’s one-fifth of a second!), suggesting that this attentional bias occurred automatically, unconsciously, and before participants even had time to think about what they were doing. Even after statistically controlling for pain levels, opioid dependence, and pre-treatment opioid misuse, people with a stronger opioid attentional bias prior to entering treatment were significantly more likely to misuse opioids 20 weeks later than people with less attentional bias to opioids.

So what is the significance of this research study for helping people with addiction and chronic pain? The study findings suggest that people who take opioids for chronic pain may develop an automatic tendency to be fixated on their medication, even when they don’t want to be. This tendency might make it difficult to stop thinking about opioids, causing craving, distraction, or other kinds of disruption in life. It might even result in or foretell opioid misuse down the line, long after a person has completed treatment. Using a performance-based dot probe test delivered by computer to detect risk for future opioid misuse may help physicians and health care providers make more informed decisions about whether and when to prescribe opioids to patients suffering from chronic pain.

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Chronic Pain Treatment, Neuroscience, and Genetics – Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement on the Radio

Today I had the opportunity to speak about the treatment, neuroscience, and genetics of chronic pain with Dr. Dan Gottlieb, host of Voices in the Family, and Dr. Jeffrey Mogil, head of the Pain Genetics Lab at McGill University, on radio station WHYY in Philadelphia (a local NPR station). I spoke about how negative emotions and stress can influence pain processing in the brain, and about how Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement can reduce the harmful impact of negative emotions on pain by teaching people to change the way they focus their attention and to reinterpret chronic pain as innocuous sensory signals from the body. 

The entire interview can be found here:

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New Paper Accepted for Publication: Mindfulness Training Targets Neurocognitive Mechanisms of Addiction at the Attention-Appraisal-Emotion Interface

mindfulness centered regulation
Neurocognitive Model of Mindfulness-Centereted Regulation (Garland, Froeliger, & Howard, 2014)

My colleagues Brett Froeliger, Matthew Howard, and I recently authored an invited conceptual review paper (FREE TO DOWNLOAD) for a special issue of Frontiers in Psychiatry: Addictive Disorders and Behavioral Dyscontrol. Prominent neuroscience models suggest that addictive behavior occurs when environmental stressors and drug-relevant cues activate a cycle of cognitive, affective, and psychophysiological mechanisms, including dysregulated interactions between bottom-up and top-down neural processes, that compel the user to seek out and use drugs. Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) target pathogenic mechanisms of the risk chain linking stress and addiction. This review describes how MBIs may target neurocognitive mechanisms of addiction at the attention-appraisal-emotion interface. Empirical evidence is presented suggesting that MBIs ameliorate addiction by enhancing cognitive regulation of a number of key processes, including: clarifying cognitive appraisal and modulating negative emotions to reduce perseverative cognition and emotional arousal; enhancing metacognitive awareness to regulate drug-use action schema and decrease addiction attentional bias; promoting extinction learning to uncouple drug-use triggers from conditioned appetitive responses; reducing cue-reactivity and increasing cognitive control over craving; attenuating physiological stress reactivity through parasympathetic activation; and increasing savoring to restore natural reward processing. Treatment and research implications of our neurocognitive framework are presented. We conclude by offering a temporally sequenced description of neurocognitive processes targeted by MBIs through a hypothetical case study. Our neurocognitive framework has implications for the optimization of addiction treatment with MBIs.

The conceptual framework outlined in this paper clarifies and contextualizes the recent results from our randomized controlled trial of Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement as a treatment for prescription opioid misuse and chronic pain.

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New Paper Accepted for Publication: Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement for Chronic Pain and Prescription Opioid Misuse – Results from an Early Stage Randomized Controlled Trial

Results from my NIH-funded clinical trial of Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE) as a treatment for chronic pain and prescription opioid misuse were recently accepted for publication in the prestigious, top-tier Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. Study findings demonstrated that MORE significantly reduced chronic pain, pain-related impairment, and stress while decreasing craving and opioid misuse among a sample of 115 people who had taken prescription opioid painkillers for more than three months. The effects of MORE on reducing pain severity and pain-related impairment were maintained for 3 months after the end of treatment, and MORE reduced disordered opioid use by 63%. These positive outcomes were linked with the development of mindfulness skills that are specifically strengthened by MORE, like the ability to “step back” and objectively observe negative thoughts and feelings in a non-reactive manner,  the ability to reinterpret pain sensations as harmless sensory information, and the ability to reappraise adverse life events as opportunities for personal growth and meaning.  In addition, participation in MORE weakened the link between desire for opioids and opioid misuse, suggesting that people who learned to use mindfulness to deal with craving were less likely to take inappropriate doses of opioids or to use opioids to self-medicate stress and negative emotions.

In some circumstances, opioids may be medically necessary for individuals experiencing prolonged and intractable pain, and most patients take medicine as prescribed. Nonetheless, opioids rarely completely alleviate chronic pain, and may lead to serious side effects, including death by overdose, as well as risk for developing opioid-related problems and addiction. As such, new interventions are needed to target chronic pain and prevent opioid misuse. Study findings indicate that MORE is a promising treatment for this growing problem. Over the next few years, additional social, psychological, and neuroscientific studies will reveal the many pathways by which MORE produces its therapeutic effects.