MILWAUKEE – Mindfulness-based practices are effective in reducing pain perceptions, but a more easily taught breath control technique also showed efficacy in a recent study. Slow, rhythmic breathing alone, even without the additional attentional components of mindfulness, had significant analgesic effects in a human experimental model of pain.
“Slow breathing is much easier to perform” than mindfulness-based meditation, Fadel Zeidan, PhD, said at the scientific meeting of the American Pain Society. More research into the technique may offer a “clinically pragmatic” nonpharmacologic option for pain control, he said. And there may be some similarities between how the two techniques work: like mindfulness meditation, slow, rhythmic breathing’s analgesic properties are not dependent on the endogenous opioid system, said Dr. Zeidan, assistant professor of anesthesiology at the University of California, San Diego. His interests include mindfulness meditation–based pain relief.
In previous work, Dr. Zeidan and his collaborators had shown that the analgesic effect of mindfulness practices is not mediated by endogenous opioids. Participants in a study were trained in mindfulness meditation, and then exposed to a pain stimulus. Compared with a control group who listened to an audiobook rather than using mindfulness practices when exposed to pain, the meditators experienced a significant reduction in pain unpleasantness (J Neurosci. 16 March 2016;36[11]:3391-7).
In the experiment, both the meditation and the control group received first an intravenous saline solution, and then the opioid antagonist naloxone, which blocks endogenous opioids. When receiving naloxone, the meditators experienced reductions in the perceived unpleasantness of pain that were similar to what they experienced when they had received saline, showing that endogenous opioids weren’t responsible for meditation’s analgesic effects.
After verifying those findings, said Dr. Zeidan, he became interested in conducting a “graded analytical dissection of mindfulness,” to see exactly which components of the practice are nonopioidergic.
With mindfulness meditation, participants engage in slow, rhythmic breathing, and they learn about observation and appraisal practices, which can briefly be described as “the awareness of arising sensory events without reaction,” Dr. Zeidan said.
Mere belief in meditation in combination with the slow rhythmic breathing might have an analgesic effect, he said. In effect, this is sham mindfulness.
To try to tease out the contributions of each component of mindfulness meditation, Dr. Zeidan and his colleagues devised an experiment that trained participants in one of three ways. Over the course of four 20-minute sessions, randomized participants were trained in slow breathing techniques, with a goal respiratory rate of 6 breaths per minute; in mindfulness meditation techniques; or in a sham mindfulness technique that did not teach specific mindfulness principles.
The randomized participants were subject to a painful heat stimulus before the training to establish a baseline.
After training, they returned for two further sessions. At each visit, they experienced the noxious stimulus with no medication. After a rest period, they then received either high-dose intravenous naloxone or saline. The allocation was randomized and administration of the study drug was double-blinded.
With naloxone or saline infusion ongoing, participants were then again subjected to the painful heat stimulus.
“All manipulations effectively reduced the respiration rate,” by 18%-21%, Dr. Zeidan said.
However, with the introduction of naloxone, both the slow-breathing group and the mindfulness group maintained reductions in pain unpleasantness, while those in the sham group had significant increases in pain unpleasantness. Reductions in pain unpleasantness ranged from 11% to 18% for these two groups, while the initial 8% reduction for the sham group climbed to a 13% increase in pain unpleasantness when this group received naloxone.
An unexpected finding was how effective slow breathing alone was as an analgesic. “There’s really something here,” said Dr. Zeidan, in reference to the analgesic effect of breath control. He explained that the slow breathing technique training was done with the aid of a device that emitted a blue glow that dimmed and brightened at the target respiratory rate.
Dr. Zeidan added that few participants were able to slow their breathing to 6 respirations per minute, but that the average rate did slow to about 12 from the normal 16 or so breaths per minute.
Dr. Zeidan reported no conflicts of interest. The National Institutes of Health funded the research.