A Call for Improving Research on Pain Neuroscience Education and Chronic Pain: An Overview of Systematic Reviews

Ref ID 889
First Author J. Martinez-Calderon
Journal JOURNAL OF ORTHOPAEDIC & SPORTS PHYSICAL THERAPY
Year Of Publishing 2023
URL https://www.jospt.org/doi/10.2519/jospt.2023.11833
Keywords • Pain
• Publication bias
• Low reporting quality
• Low methodological quality
• Disclosure
Problem(s) • Low methodological (AMSTAR) quality
• Conflicts of interest or funding of included studies not assessed
• Redundant / overlapping / duplicated review question; leads to research waste
• Reasons for excluding potentially eligible studies not provided
• Poor consideration of publication bias
Article Type Empirical
Article Subtype Cross-sectional survey/Methodological systematic review
First Author Country Spain
Checklists • AMSTAR 2
Aim To summarize the evidence of the effects of pain neuroscience education delivered alone or combined with other interventions for chronic pain based on the Systematic reviews with meta-analysis.
Level of Investigation Descriptive
Summary of Findings From eight systematic review the effects of pain neuroscience education delivered alone or combined with other interventions for chronic pain indexed across CINAHL (via EBSCOhost), Embase, PsycINFO (via ProQuest), PubMed, and the Cochrane Library from inception to November 14, 2022. All of the systematic reviews (n = 8/8, 100%) were judged to have a critically low methodological quality (AMSTAR 2). Only 2 reviews provided a list of excluded studies (n = 2/8, 25%) or adequately assessed publication bias, and only 1 reported the funding source for the clinical trials they included (n = 7/8, 87%). There was also an overall primary study overlap of 13% and higher overlap for specific conditions e.g. chronic low back pain (40%). Four out of eight systematic reviews published during 2022 evaluated similar research questions.
Number of systematic reviews included 8
Number of eligible systematic reviews assessed 90