State of the art in EEG signal features of mindfulness-based treatments for chronic pain.

Abstract

A systematic review of electroencephalographic (EEG) correlates of Mindfulness- based treatment for chronic pain is presented. Recent technological advances have made EEG acquisition more accessible and also reliable. EEG monitoring before, during, and after treatment might support efficacy assessment and enable real- time adaptive intervention. The preliminary research extracted 131 papers from 6 scientific search engines. The application of the exclusion criteria led to the selection of 4 papers, indicating that the topic is still unexplored and further investigations are required. The collected papers exhibited great variability making challenging the comparison, nevertheless promising EEG correlates emerged. In particular, pain-related evoked potentials correlate with Mindfulness-Based treatment. EEG source analysis revealed the prevalent involvement of regions modulating emotional responses. In addition, higher baseline theta power was associated with greater improvement in depression when Mindfulness-based treatments are administered. This last result makes EEG also suitable for evaluating which patients can benefit most from mindfulness-based treatments.