Importance Placebo effects reduce pain and contribute to clinical analgesia, but after
decades of research, it remains unclear whether placebo treatments mainly affect�…

The brain systems underlying placebo analgesia are insufficiently understood. Here we
performed a systematic, participant-level meta-analysis of experimental functional�…

Drug treatments for pain often do not outperform placebo, and a better understanding of
placebo mechanisms is needed to improve treatment development and clinical practice. In a�…

A fundamental question for placebo research is whether such responses are a
predisposition, quantifiable by brain characteristics. We examine this issue in chronic back�…

Placebo treatments reliably reduce pain in the clinic and in the lab. Because pain is a
subjective experience, it has been difficult to determine whether placebo analgesia is�…

The placebo response is universally observed in clinical trials of pain treatments, yet the
individual characteristics rendering a patient a 'placebo responder'remain unclear. Here, in�…

Expectations of pain relief drive placebo analgesia. Understanding how expectations of
improvement trigger distinct biological systems to shape therapeutic analgesic outcomes�…

Pain requires the integration of sensory, cognitive, and affective information. The use of
placebo is a common methodological ploy in many fields, including pain. Neuroimaging�…

Identifying biomarkers that predict mental states with large effect sizes and high test-retest
reliability is a growing priority for fMRI research. We examined a well-established�…

Methods| This study was approved by the ethics committee at University College London,
and written informed consent was obtained from the participants. A 3-T fMRI scan was�…