An umbrella review of the literature on the effectiveness of psychological interventions for pain reduction

BACKGROUND: Psychological interventions are widely implemented for pain management and treatment, but their reported effectiveness shows considerable variation and there is elevated likelihood for bias. METHODS: We summarized the strength of evidence and extent of potential biases in the published literature of psychological interventions for pain treatment using a range of criteria, including the statistical significance of the random effects summary estimate and of the largest study of each meta-analysis, number of participants, 95% prediction intervals, between-study heterogeneity, small-study effects and excess significance bias. RESULTS: Thirty-eight publications were identified, investigating 150 associations between several psychological interventions and 29 different types of pain. Of the 141 associations based on only randomized controlled trials, none presented strong or highly suggestive evidence by satisfying all the aforementioned criteria. The effect of psychological interventions on reducing cancer pain severity, pain in patients with arthritis, osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, breast cancer, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, self-reported needle-related pain in children/adolescents or with chronic musculoskeletal pain, chronic non-headache pain and chronic pain in general were supported by suggestive evidence. CONCLUSIONS: The present findings reveal the lack of strong supporting empirical evidence for the effectiveness of psychological treatments for pain management and highlight the need to further evaluate the established approach of psychological interventions to ameliorate pain. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s40359-017-0200-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.