The following is a summary of “Within-Person Relationships between Catastrophizing and Pain Intensity During a Mind-Body Intervention to Prevent Persistent Pain and Disability after Acute Traumatic Orthopedic Injury,” published in the November 2024 issue of Pain by Frumkin et al. 

Interventions to prevent chronic pain after acute traumatic injury could reduce healthcare costs and enhance QoL. However, limited research has analyzed the mechanisms of change through repeated measures, such as session-by-session assessments.  

Researchers conducted a retrospective study to examine within-person relationships between pain catastrophizing and intensity during and after a 4-session mind-body intervention for individuals with acute traumatic orthopedic injury.  

They used random intercept cross-lagged panel models (N = 76, T = 445) to examine within-person autoregressive, contemporaneous, and cross-lagged effects between pain catastrophizing and pain intensity while accounting for stable between-person differences.  

The results showed partial support for the primary hypothesis: improvements in catastrophizing were associated with subsequent reductions in pain intensity, as indicated by a significant within-person cross-lagged effect between post-test catastrophizing and 3-month follow-up pain with activity (β = 0.421, SE = 0.099, P < .001). Additionally, improvement in catastrophizing was linked to same-session improvement in pain intensity mid-intervention. Bidirectional within-person analyses ruled out the possibility of pain improvements driving subsequent catastrophizing enhancements. 

Investigators concluded improvements in catastrophizing during psychosocial interventions may prevent the transition from acute to chronic pain after injury, suggesting a potential mechanism for pain prevention. 

Source: jpain.org/article/S1526-5900(24)00715-6/abstract