REcasting psychological interventions for Customizing, Optimizing, Validating, and Enhancing Recovery of chronic pain patients

Chronic non-cancer pain (CP) negatively impacts all areas of functioning, severely limiting quality of life and increasing the risk of mental disorders.

Psychological interventions are a key part of treatment, with meta-analyses showing small to moderate effects on pain intensity and associated outcomes. Psychological interventions are themselves complex, with multiple, distinct components.

There is presently no taxonomy of these components and no information about which components are the active ingredients supporting the treatment effect, which are redundant or even harmful and whether some patients respond better to some components rather than others.

The RECOVER project is premised on two principles: (1) to optimize treatments, we need to know their building blocks; (2) to improve treatment response, we need to examine patient-level predictors of responses.

The aims of RECOVER are (a) decomposing complex psychological interventions for CP; (b) re-evaluating efficacy by examining the specific contributions of components and combinations; c) examining patient characteristics (e.g.,age, gender, pain history) predictive of better response to components or combinations and d) creating an open app based on the project findings, allowing users to personalize treatment by selecting the most effective components.

The methodology will involve retrieving and reutilizing individual participant data from randomized controlled trials of psychological interventions for CP and using advanced meta-analytic methodology such as component network meta-analysis.

Training activities will span the entire project duration, and the outcomes will be presented at international conferences and submitted to top-tier, peer-reviewed journals.

RECOVER has the potential to make important strides toward optimizing and personalizing psychological treatment of chronic pain.