Personalized behavior management as a replacement for medications for pain control and mood regulation

Abstract

A lack of personalized approaches in non-medication pain management has prevented these alternative forms of treatment from achieving the desired efficacy. One hundred and ten female patients with fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS) and 60 healthy women without chronic pain were assessed for severity of chronic or retrospective occasional pain, respectively, along with alexithymia, depression, anxiety, coping strategies, and personality traits. All analyses were conducted following a ‘resource matching’ hypothesis predicting that to be effective, a behavioral coping mechanism diverting or producing cognitive resources should correspond to particular mechanisms regulating pain severity in the patient. Moderated mediation analysis found that extraverts could effectively cope with chronic pain and avoid the use of medications for pain and mood management by lowering depressive symptoms through the use of distraction mechanism as a habitual (‘out-of-touch-with-reality’) behavior. However, introverts could effectively cope with chronic pain and avoid the use of medications by lowering catastrophizing through the use of distraction mechanism as a situational (‘in-touch-with-reality’) behavior. Thus, personalized behavior management techniques applied according to a mechanism of capturing or diverting the main individual ‘resource’ of the pain experience from its ‘feeding’ to supporting another activity may increase efficacy in the reduction of pain severity along with decreasing the need for pain relief and mood-stabilizing medications.

Migraine and Neuroticism: A Scoping Review

“…Results of the review confirm that, nowadays, personality continues being a central theme in psychology and therapy due to the relevance of personality traits in the design and implementation of more effective and personalized treatments [ 8 ]. There is no theory of human behavior that does not address this question or include it in some way as trait, individual difference, or related to the self-concept, self-esteem, etc.…”

“…One possible explanation factor is the need to consider the personality traits (i.e., habitual patterns of behavior, thought, and emotion such as neuroticism, psychoticism, extraversion, coping strategies, etc.) in the treatment of each disease [ 7 , 8 ]. By including personality traits in treatment and management of illnesses, it would make possible a more personalized approach for these patients and it seems to be related to a reduction of medication overuse [ 8 ].…”

“…By including personality traits in treatment and management of illnesses, it would make possible a more personalized approach for these patients and it seems to be related to a reduction of medication overuse [ 8 ]. In this sense, neuroticism is one of the most studied personality traits due to is implications for the health, not only mental but also physical [ 8 , 9 ]. Neuroticism can be considered as a disposition to suffer anxiety and emotional disorders in general [ 10 ].…”

The Link between Fibromyalgia Syndrome and Anger: A Systematic Review Revealing Research Gaps

“…In conclusion, although, as indicated above, a pain-prone personality seems not to exist and the personality patterns reported in several research result from facing to a chronic stress situation such as chronic pain, chronic pain patients and healthy participants are supposed to significantly differ in personality, indicating that the specific disease seems not to determine the pattern since it depends on the chronicity of the same [30]. Nonetheless, it should be noted the relevance to include the emotional factors for better approaching aimed at getting better health outcomes in the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of FMS [23,50,56].…”

“…Anger processing might contribute to explain the specific significance attribution of pain to angry faces in FMS [40]. FMS patients usually exhibit high levels of alexithymia, a personality disposition affecting emotional self-awareness [50,56,71,[81][82][83][84][85]. Alexithymia may be conceptualized as a cognitive style characterized by a problem in identifying and describing subjective feelings, and low externally oriented thinking [86,87].…”