Mental Function And Quality Of Life With Chronic Pain

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Background: Chronic pain is common in Veterans and astute rehabilitation plans are critical to avoid deleterious outcomes for functional outcomes and other quality of life (QoL). Attaining optimal functional outcomes after pain rehabilitation is challenging, however, in cases when a significant portion of disability stems from “nonorganic” psychological factors. Disability from primarily psychologically-driven factors would make a Veteran a poor candidate for invasive medical procedures (which would have minimal benefit and potential harms). Nonorganic pain has been traditionally probed using clinician-rated “Waddell signs.” However, these signs are inconsistently probed, with questionable inter-rater reliability and can be challenging in the VHA wherein symptom endorsement can be financially reinforced. Therefore, there is a critical need for a time-sensitive, hard-to-feign objective marker of psychologically-driven disability for treatment planning. This project is a proof-of-concept study to determine whether subconscious bias toward pain, such as attentional capture by pain-related stimuli, correlates with mood symptomatology and clinician impressions of psychologically-driven disability at intake, with an exploratory aim of relating bias metrics to pain treatment outcomes. Approach: Over a 15-month period, 50 Veterans slated for assessment at a VA medical center (VAMC) pain clinic and 30 “control” Veterans slated for a non-pain-related appointment (e.g. Primary Care) with minimal pain histories will identified from electronic medical records (EMR) and approached prior to their intake appointment and invited to complete a ~90-minute assessment battery on a portable touchscreen-tablet-PC, either in their home or at the VAMC. This battery will be composed of interview-based instruments of pain symptomatology and disability (e.g. occupational function), affective symptomatology and QoL, as well as performance of neurocognitive tasks of subconscious bias toward pain- related concepts/words and pain-related images. Comparator tasks of impulsivity and frustration tolerance will also be included. This assessment will conclude with the patient making ratings of the burden or aversiveness of the assessments themselves. Six months following this assessment, participants will repeat by telephone interview the pain symptom, pain disability and QoL assessment items probed at baseline. In addition to the core goal of probing the feasibility of computerized bias assessment in Veterans with chronic pain, analyses will test for: 1) differences in subconscious pain bias between pain and non-pain patients, and 2) correlations between subconscious bias and mood/pain/disability/QoL symptom scores at baseline, to assess the core validity of probing subconscious bias measures in pain patients. As value-added supplemental analyses, we will: 1) relate assessment items (both bias tasks and interview instrument scores) to Waddell ratings of intake clinicians noted in EMR, 2) relate attentional (implicit) bias scores to pain and disability ratings at follow-up. Follow-on MERIT projects: Many Veterans who show signs of psychologically-driven disability are reluctant to adopt provider recommendations to seek integrative mental health care. To help providers motivate these patients, follow-on MERIT studies will collect evidence that Veterans with psychologically-driven pain disability selectively benefit from wrap-around mental health care. The strongest neurobehavioral markers (of self-reported and clinician- rated psychological distress) from the laptop assessment of this I21 project will be ported to a mobile app testing platform for a full-scale observational study designed to show whether app (task) results are predictive of pain treatment outcomes, as a function of whether mental health services were utilized. These data will enable the testing app to return actual bias “risk” scores to the patient and provider. In a subsequent clinical trial of the app’s risk score, we will compare functional rehabilitation outcomes when the psychological risk rating is (one study arm) vs is not (other arm) available to the provider for treatment planning. Rehabilitation outcomes in terms of whole QoL and pain symptomatology will be tracked and compared between groups as a function of (interaction with) whether app-flagged (probable-nonorganic pain) cases were given integrative mental health services.