Pretreatment anxiety and pain acceptance are associated with response to trigger point injection therapy for chronic myofascial pain.

BACKGROUND AND AIM: This study examined the psychosocial profile of patients who responded or did not respond to trigger point injection therapy for chronic myofascial pain. METHODS: Seventy one patients with a diagnosis of chronic myofascial pain of the paraspinous muscles completed a pretreatment questionnaire measuring demographic and social factors, and validated scales to assess pain intensity, pain interference (physical and emotional), and defined psychological characteristics (pain catastrophizing, pain acceptance, pain self-efficacy, mood and anxiety). Trigger point injection therapy of the affected areas of myofascial pain was performed and follow-up was conducted by telephone at one week (n = 65) and one month (n = 63) post intervention to assess treatment outcome (pain intensity and pain-related physical interference). RESULTS: At one week follow-up and one-month follow-up, using pain-related physical interference as the outcome measure, we found that those who responded well to treatment were characterized by a lower level of pretreatment anxiety and a higher level of pain acceptance, with anxiety being the strongest predictor. CONCLUSION: These results suggest that responses to interventional pain management in chronic myofascial paraspinous pain may be influenced by psychological characteristics, especially pretreatment anxiety.

The surplus identification task and limits to multiattribute consumer choice.

We introduce and demonstrate a novel experimental method for investigating the accuracy of consumer decision making. The Surplus Identification (S-ID) task exploits techniques from detection theory. Experimental control over surpluses is established by incentivizing participants to adopt a predetermined, objectively defined preference function. Surplus is then manipulated across multiple forced-choice trials in which participants decide whether a product does or does not confer a surplus at a given price. The S-ID task can be used to investigate how precision, bias, and learning vary with multiple properties of prices, attributes, and contexts. We demonstrate the task via a series of experiments that test the ability to apply a weighted adding decision strategy (with equal weights) as the number of product attributes increases. Imprecision increases sharply with additional attributes and larger trade-offs between them. Participants display persistent biases across the price range. These vary systematically with the number of attributes, implying a precision-bias trade-off. The findings have implications for models of multiattribute choice and for consumer policy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).