Pain Neuroscience Education in management of non-traumatic neck pain: a scoping review

Abstract

Background

Over the past two decades, biopsychosocial models of education have emerged for the treatment of various conditions, including neck pain (NP). One increasingly popular biopsychosocial education method is Pain Neuroscience Education (PNE), which educates patients about the neurobiological and neurophysiological basis of their conditions.

Objectives

To review the evidence for the effectiveness of PNE as a treatment approach for patients with NP.

Design

A scoping literature review.

Methods

We searched the PubMed, PEDro and Scopus databases, conducted an additional non-systematic search in the GoogleScholar database and reviewed the reference lists of identified systematic reviews on this topic. We included articles with any experimental research design that: examined patients with non-traumatic NP; examined the effects of the PNE method alone or in combination with other therapeutic interventions; compared the effects of the PNE intervention with any type of therapeutic intervention or with no intervention.

Results and conclusions

The searches identified 216 potentially relevant studies, 9 of which met our inclusion criteria. The included studies examined the effects of the PNE method on pain intensity (7/9 studies), catastrophizing (6/9 studies), kinesiophobia (5/9 studies), and disability (6/9 studies). The results of this review suggest that PNE, when integrated into multimodal treatment plans, can help improve pain-related outcomes and overall quality of life in CNP patients. Further research is needed to investigate the specific benefits of combining PNE with different therapeutic modalities in different patient subgroups.

Keywords:

• Pain neuroscience education
• therapeutic neuroscience education
• neck pain
• chronic pain
• explain pain

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics statement

This article is a literature review, with no new empirical data collected with human participants or animals. Therefore, ethical approval was not sought.

Additional information

Funding

The study was supported by the Slovenian Research Agency through the research program KINSPO – Kinesiology for the effectiveness and prevention of musculoskeletal injuries in sports [P5-0443].