# Brain Mechanisms Supporting Mindfulness Meditation-Based Chronic Pain Relief

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO · 2021 · $394,693

## Abstract

Project Summary
Pain is a multidimensional experience that involves sensory, cognitive and affective factors. The constellation
of interactions between these factors renders the treatment of chronic pain challenging and often a financial
burden. In fact, chronic pain affects over 100 million Americans and costs the United States approximately
$635 billion dollars a year. The widespread use of opioids to treat chronic pain has led to the so-called “opioid
epidemic” due to the exponential growth in opioid misuse and addiction. These staggering statistics highlight
the importance of developing, testing and validating fast-acting, non-pharmacological approaches to treat pain.
Mindfulness meditation is a technique that has been found to significantly reduce pain in experimental and
clinical settings. However, lack of mechanistic data and the assumption that extensive meditation training is
required to experience analgesia has limited the clinical deployment of this cost-effective and narcotic-free
treatment. Recent findings from our laboratory determined that mindfulness meditation, after only four sessions
(20 minutes/session) of training, dramatically reduces pain intensity and unpleasantness ratings. Across two
functional neuroimaging studies, employing perfusion-based MRI (arterial spin labeling), we found that
mindfulness meditation-induced pain relief was associated with greater activation of the right anterior insula
(aINS), orbitofrontal (OFC) and subgenual anterior cingulate (sgACC) cortex. We have also found that
meditation-related analgesia was associated with significant thalamic deactivation. These findings demonstrate
that mindfulness meditation reduces pain through multiple brain mechanisms related to increased cognitive
control, emotion regulation and attenuation of ascending nociceptive input. However, these results cannot be
generalized to chronic pain because they were associated with healthy, pain-free participants and thermally
induced pain. Importantly, the brain mechanisms supporting the modulation of chronic pain by mindfulness
meditation remain unknown. Thus, the central aim of the proposed R01 study is to determine the specific
mechanisms supporting the modulation of acutely exacerbated chronic low-back pain, the most prevalent and
financially burdensome chronic pain condition, by acutely trained mindfulness meditation. We will determine if
the neural mechanisms found to attenuate experimentally induced pain by mindfulness meditation (i.e., OFC,
sgACC, thalamus) are also associated with modulating chronic low back pain. It is also unknown how much
training is required to enhance the hypothesized relationship between the brain mechanisms supporting
mindfulness meditation and chronic low-back pain relief. Thus, we will examine if meditation, after longer bouts
of meditation training, will increase the hypothesized relationship between meditation-induced brain activation
(i.e., OFC, sgACC, aINS) and chronic low back pain relief....

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10137191
- **Project number:** 5R01AT009693-05
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO
- **Principal Investigator:** Fadel Zeidan
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $394,693
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2019-01-01 → 2023-04-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10137191

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10137191, Brain Mechanisms Supporting Mindfulness Meditation-Based Chronic Pain Relief (5R01AT009693-05). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10137191. Licensed CC0.

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