Two medical doctoral students of the Bingellab, Aoibhne Braunewell (right) and Hannah Gronewold (left), secured two of the competitive ELAN grants. From the summer semester 2025 onwards, they will conduct their doctoral projects as part of the lab.

Aoibhne’s ELAN light project will compare the empathic and prosocial abilities of people with and without chronic pain conditions such as chronic back pain to investigate how people with persistent pain can understand and share the pain of others around them.

Hannah’s ELAN project aims to investigate the impact of experienced side effects on subsequent treatment decisions using an experimental pain paradigm. By understanding these effects, they seek to improve patient adherence and optimize decision-making in pharmacotherapy in the long run.

Performing high-quality research can be challenging, especially for early career researchers! Helena Hartmann and her colleagues created a solution: ARIADNE – a living and interactive resource navigator that helps to use and search a dynamically updated database of resources. In the corresponding published tutorial in the journal Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, they guide researchers through a standard research project using ARIADNE along the way. Read the paper here and try out the tool here!

We warmly invite you to this great online patient forum (in German) on 29.9.2024 from 17:30 – 19:15 where Ulrike Bingel, Helena Hartmann, and Sven Benson will talk about the power of expectations. Click here to download the flyer and here to register for the Zoom webinar.

At the WTZ-Aktionstag organized by the Westdeutsches Tumorzentrum, some of the Bingellab’s members showed patients and colleagues what and how we are researching treatment expectations and their effects on pain. Thanks to all people who were interested in our work!

A CRC/TRR 289 research team from the Universities of Marburg, Giessen and Essen (including the Bingellab) investigated how treatment expectations influence treatment success and how homeopathy uses these effects. Homeopathy is often presented as having no effect at all because no effect beyond the placebo effect has been proven. Globules do not contain any pharmacologically active ingredients that could rationally explain an effect, yet both patients and homeopaths report positive effects for various disorders. How can this be explained? Read the original publication here.

Interdisciplinary multimodal pain treatment (IMPT) represents an effective treatment option for chronic pain. Alas, it is also a very expensive and personnel-intensive intervention. Although IMPT could be accomplished in a resource-saving day hospital setting, there is no general insurance coverage for it and thus, IMPT is usually conducted in an in-patient setting. In this study, members of the CRC compared the differences in treatment outcome between, an otherwise identical, ambulatory and in-patient IMPT, at the back pain center Essen, in a matched cohort. Our data provide novel insights by suggesting at least equal effectiveness of ambulatory compared with in-patient IMPT for patients with chronic back pain. Moreover, ambulatory treatment seemed partly superior, with greater improvements in pain-related disability 3 months and in pain intensity 6 months post treatment. This advantage could have been driven by a larger gain in pain-related self-efficacy, which was already present, directly post-treatment for ambulatory patients. Read the english publication led by Dustin Maser and Ulrike Bingel in the journal Pain here.

The therapeutic effect of medicines is determined by more than their pharmacological properties. Factors such as the colour of a tablet, its taste and even its price have been found to significantly influence efficacy. This insight has sparked optimism about the potential to enhance drug effects by tweaking these and other features to optimize therapeutic outcomes. In a new article published in Brain, Schenk and colleagues add a somewhat counter-intuitive factor to the list of features that could be targeted to boost the efficacy of a drug: side effects. Read the english commentary by Katja Wiech, Helena Hartmann, and Ulrike Bingel in the journal Brain here. You can find the original study here.

In a collaboration with Tamas Spisak’s lab, we show a predictive model based on brain connectivity that explains individual differences in pain learning and shows promise as a biomarker in translational pain research. Read the full article here.

Become a part of the Bingellab: We are looking for a motivated Postdoc in Essen! Topic: Cognitive modulators of pain and analgesia in health and chronic pain as part of the CRC/TRR 289. Methods: Functional/structural MRI and pharmacology. More information here.

On the 25th of April, two boys interested in science spent the day in the lab for Boys Day. We had lots of fun with the rubberhand illusion, information about studying medicine and doing science at the same time, talking about transcranial magnetic stimulation, crafting brain helmets out of paper, and measuring pain with the cold pressor task.