How long does the positive effect of a three-week treatment with open-label placebos (OLP) last in chronic back pain? This research question was posed by the team led by Dr. Julian Kleine Borgmann and Prof. Ulrike Bingel from the Center for Translational Neuro- and Behavioral Sciences at the University Hospital Essen, where they started a three-year follow-up study. The results have now been published as a research paper in the journal PAIN and can be read here. After three years, the effect was no longer detectable in terms of pain intensity, movement restrictions and mood. Read more about the study here!

The website of the 4th International Conference of the Society for Interdisciplinary Placebo Studies is online, and the call for abstracts and early bird registration are open!

The program already consists of seven plenary sessions and you can apply yourself for four different contributions: poster presentation, data blitz, workshop, or science slam. For all young scientists we have also planned two special program items: A Science Slam, where you can present your own research clearly and understandably in just 3 minutes, and a (free!) Summer School with workshops on Open Science, Bayesian Analysis in JASP, Science Communication, and Online Visibility as a Scientist.

Visit us at www.sips-conference.com!

The conference is co-organized by the SIPS and the Collaborative Research Center CRC/TRR 289 “Treatment Expectation”.

We are happy to welcome Jens Sperzel who studies human medicine at the Universität Duisburg-Essen. As part of the COLA project and additional 7 Tesla measurements at the Erwin L. Hahn Institute, he will devote himself to his medical doctoral thesis and other areas of pain research.

Sarah Neumann recently started to work as a student assistant in our team. She is studying educational science at the Universität Duisburg-Essen and will asstist in several administrative areas in our lab.  

Today we have a new medical doctoral student starting in the lab to do her dissertation with us!

Clara Erfurt is studying human medicine at the Universität Duisburg-Essen and is going to start her research for her dissertation in October at the Bingellab. She will be supporting one of our experimental studies and will be researching in the field of placebo effects und treatment expectation.

We warmly welcome Jialin Li who will join our lab as a PhD candidate in the following three years! She did a lab rotation with us and Dr. Tamas Spisak, supported by the Max Planck School of Cognition. Before that, she got her Master’s degree in Psychology from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, under supervision of Prof. Benjamin Becker and Prof. Keith Kendrick. Her research interests include placebo and nocebo effects, appetitive and aversive learning, how expectation and learning influence treatment, and disease prediction using machine learning approach.

Dr. Boushra Dalile from KU Leuven will join our lab for two smaller research stays in the next few months! She is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Translational Research Center for Gastrointestinal Disorders (TARGID) at KU Leuven, Belgium. She was trained in Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience (2012-2017) and holds a PhD in Biomedical Sciences from KU Leuven (2021), where she investigated the role of short-chain fatty acids in the human microbiota-gut-brain axis, particularly pertaining to psychophysiological stress- and fear-related responses under the supervision of Prof. Kristin Verbeke. He research interests include the gut microbiota, dietary fiber, short-chain fatty acids as well as brain health in general, and psychological stress, anxiety, and cognition in particular. Currently, she is working on unravelling the mechanisms that mediate the effect of short-chain fatty acids on the stress response in human, and the implications of that on various brain functions. Her work was published in various peer-reviewed academic journals including Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Neuropsychopharmacology, and Psychoneuroendocrinology.

Julian and Katharina recently published a new paper, where 89 patients were investigated for changes between the groups with and without previous open-label placebo treatment regarding pain intensity (primary outcome), disability and mood (secondary outcomes), biopsychosocial factors and lifestyle (exploratory outcomes) from parent baseline to follow-up. The results: Over the three-year period, there were no differences in any outcome between groups with and without open-label placebo treatment. Therefore, the study does not support the previously suggested assumption that a three-week open-label placebo treatment has long-term effects. Read the full article here.

For the next 3 weeks, we welcome Deniz Büyükgök as a visiting fellow into the lab! She is a neuropsychologist at Istanbul University, Faculty of Medicine, at the Psychiatry Department. She completed her PhD in the same university, at the Advanced Neurological Sciences Program. Her dissertation included functional neuroimaging on apathy. She is eager to conduct more translational research. That’s why she wanted to visit Prof. Bingel’s research unit to gain new insight and to deepen my knowledge. We all hope this will be an opportunity to build bridges between colleagues abroad.

Together with colleagues from Essen and Bochum, Katharina just published a new paper on the interruptive effect of visceral pain on cognition. In a previous study, Julian had demonstrated that visceral pain caused a stronger reduction of memory encoding than somatic pain (find the paper here). Katharina now showed that this greater interruptive effect of visceral pain is accompanied by reduced neural activity in brain areas involved in visual processing and memory encoding. In some of these brain regions, this activity reduction was associated with pain-related fear. Read Katharina’s article here.