Strategies to Assist With Management of Pain
Public ClinicalTrials.gov record NCT03115359. Field values are reproduced from the official study page; the official ClinicalTrials.gov record remains the source of truth for eligibility, enrollment, and contact information.
Data is sourced from official ClinicalTrials.gov public API records. Always review the official ClinicalTrials.gov record for the latest information.
Official title
A Comparative Effectiveness Randomized Controlled Trial of Mindfulness Meditation Versus Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Opioid-Treated Chronic Low Back Pain
Brief summary
Reproduced verbatim from the official ClinicalTrials.gov record. Not medical advice.
Chronic low back pain (CLBP) has no known effective treatment. While often treated with long-term opioid therapy, opioids do not work well for many patients and can cause serious side effects, including addiction, poorer mental health, and overdose death. Even when paired with a standard-of-care cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), results are limited. Patients, families and clinicians are very interested in using alternative treatments for CLBP, especially complementary and integrative treatments such as mindfulness meditation (MM). MM helps train the mind to bring non-judgmental and accepting attention to present-moment experiences such as pain. MM offers an active and safe self-care approach to chronic pain that contrasts with the passive and potentially harmful nature of opioid treatment, and may prove more effective than CBT in helping improve health and well-being, and reduce reliance on opioids in adults with opioid-treated CLBP. Although this hypothesis is supported by early research, including a pilot study by the Principal Investigator, evidence on MM's effectiveness in this population is inconclusive, presenting a critical knowledge gap. With input from patients, family members, and clinicians, the Investigators have designed a study to address this gap and propose a clinical trial that will compare the effectiveness of MM to standard-of-care CBT in opioid-treated CLBP. Based on the existing research, it is hypothesized that MM training will lead to a larger reduction in pain intensity, increase in physical function, improvement in quality of life, and decrease in daily opioid dose, as compared to CBT training, with benefits of MM especially notable in adults with worse mood, anxiety or unhealthy opioid-use behaviors who often experience more severe symptoms of CLBP and less improvement in response to existing therapies. To test these hypotheses, 766 adults with opioid-treated CLBP will be randomly assigned into one of two 8-week treatment groups: MM (383 participants) that will receive the MM training or CBT (383 participants) that will receive the CBT training. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic-related restrictions, the study protocol was modified in October 2020 so that the study can be completed virtually. The effectiveness of MM versus CBT will be assessed over a 12-month period with patient-reported measures, recommended by experts and endorsed by our stakeholder partners, including patients with opioid-treated CLBP, their families and clinicians.
Study identification
- NCT ID
- NCT03115359
- Recruitment status
- Completed
- Study type
- Interventional
- Phase
- Not applicable
- Enrollment
- 770 participants
Conditions and interventions
Conditions
Interventions
- Mindfulness Based Therapy Behavioral
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Behavioral
Behavioral
Eligibility (public fields only)
- Age range
- 21 Years and older
- Sex
- All
- Healthy volunteers
- Healthy volunteers not accepted
This page does not interpret eligibility. Detailed inclusion and exclusion criteria are on the official ClinicalTrials.gov record.
Study timeline
- Start date
- Jun 29, 2017
- Primary completion
- Jan 14, 2023
- Completion
- Jan 14, 2023
- Last update posted
- Sep 18, 2024
2017 – 2023
United States locations
- U.S. sites
- 4
- U.S. states
- 4
- U.S. cities
- 4
| Facility | City | State | ZIP | Site status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brigham and Women's Hospital | Boston | Massachusetts | 02115 | — |
| Pennsylvania State University | Hershey | Pennsylvania | 16802 | — |
| University of Utah | Salt Lake City | Utah | 84112 | — |
| University of Wisconsin-Madison | Madison | Wisconsin | 53715 | — |
Site contact phone numbers, emails, and investigator names are intentionally not displayed here. Open the official ClinicalTrials.gov record for site contact information.
About this trial record page
- What this page shows
- Public field values for ClinicalTrials.gov record NCT03115359, including study identification, conditions, interventions, eligibility (age, sex, healthy volunteer), timeline, and U.S. site list.
- What this page does not do
- No medical advice, eligibility judgments, treatment recommendations, study quality scoring, or AI-generated medical summaries. No site contact phone numbers, emails, or investigator names.
- Where the data comes from
- Sourced from the official ClinicalTrials.gov public API. The official record is the source of truth.
- Last refresh
- Last update posted Sep 18, 2024 · Synced Sep 6, 2026
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Open the official record
The complete protocol, eligibility criteria, and contact information for NCT03115359 live on ClinicalTrials.gov.