Study reveals insight into the capacity of CBD to decrease pain

Overview

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• Source: Syracuse University


• Date: 24 Apr,2021

It’s been hailed as a wonder drug and it’s certainly creating wonder profits. By some estimates, the Cannabidiol (or CBD) market could be worth $20 billion dollars by 2024. While consumers tout its effectiveness in pain relief, up until now there has been limited experimental human research on the true effectiveness of the medication. But a new study led by researchers at Syracuse University sheds light on the ability of CBD to decrease pain together with the impact that the so-called placebo effect may have on pain results.

“That is a fair question because we know that simply telling someone that a substance has the ability to alleviate their pain may actually cause robust changes in their pain sensitivity. These are known as expectancy effects.”

De Vita, along with Syracuse Emeritus Psychology Professor Stephen Maisto, were uniquely ready to answer this exact question. The pair, along with fellow lab member and doctoral candidate Dezarie Moskal, formerly conducted the first systematic review and meta-analysis of experimental research examining the effects cannabinoid drugs on pain. Since the first experimental pain trial to analyze CBD, their analysis yielded consistent and noteworthy results. Among other findings, the data showed that CBD and expectancies for getting CBD do not appear to reduce experimental pain intensity, but do make the pain feel less disagreeable.

De Vita and Maisto used sophisticated equipment that securely induces experimental heat pain, letting them measure how the recipient’s nervous system reacts and responds to it. “Then we administer a drug, like pure CBD, or a placebo and then re-assess their pain responses and determine how they change based on which substance was administered,” said De Vita.

Researchers then took it a step further by manipulating the information given to participants about which substances they received. In some cases, participants were advised that they got CBD when they actually received a placebo, or told they would be getting a placebo when they actually got CBD. “That way we could parse out if it was the drug that alleviated the pain, or whether it was the anticipation that they had received the drug that reduced their pain,” according to De Vita. “We hypothesized that we would mostly detect expectancy-induced placebo analgesia (pain relief). What we found though after measuring several different pain outcomes is that it is actually just a little bit of both. That is, we found improvements in pain measures caused by the pharmacological effects of CBD as well as the psychological effects of just expecting that they had gotten CBD. It was pretty surprising and remarkable.”

“The data is exciting but pretty complicated because different pain measures responded differently to the drug effect, to the expectancy, or both the medication and expectancy combined–so we are still trying to figure out what is behind the aggregated information with different kinds of pain measures,” stated Maisto. “The next step is analyzing the mechanisms underlying these findings and figuring out why giving directions or CBD itself causes certain reactions to a pain stimulus.”

Most individuals think of pain as an on and off switch, you either have it or you do not. However, pain, as De Vita describes it, is a complex phenomenon with several dimensions influenced by psychological and biological aspects. By way of instance, whereas pain intensity reflects a”sensory” dimension of pain, unpleasantness signifies an”affective,” or psychological, aspect of pain. “If you think of pain as the noxious noise coming out of a radio the quantity can represent the intensity of the pain, while the station can represent the quality,” said De Vita.

Results from his previous study showed that while cannabinoid drugs were not reducing the quantity of pain, they were”changing the channel making it a little less unpleasant.” We replicated that in this study and found that CBD and expectancies didn’t significantly decrease the volume of the pain, but they did make it less unpleasant–it didn’t bother them as much.” As part of this study De Vita and Maisto developed advanced experimental pain measurement protocols”to pop the hood and start looking at a number of these other mechanistic pain procedures,” stated De Vita. “It’s not only pain, yes or no, but there are these other dimensions of pain, and it would be interesting to see which ones are being targeted. We found that occasionally pharmacological effects of CBD brought down some of those, but the expectancies didn’t. Sometimes they did it. Sometimes it was just the expectancy. And so, we were moving into this thinking we were going to mostly detect the expectancy-induced pain relief but what we discovered was way more complicated than that and that is exciting.”

One important note to also consider is the origin of the CBD. “What we used in our analysis was pure CBD isolate oil,” said De Vita. “Commercially available CBD products differ in their content and purity, so results might differ for different CBD products, based on what other substances that they may or may not contain.”

Martin De Vita is presently completing a clinical psychology internship at Brooke Army Medical Center, JBSA, TX.