Neuroscience Education as Therapy for Migraine and Overlapping Pain Conditions: A Scoping Review

Neuroscience education therapy (NET) has been successfully used for numerous overlapping pain conditions, but few studies have investigated NET for migraine.

We sought to 1) review the literature on NET used for the treatment of various pain conditions to assess how NET has been studied thus far and 2) recommend considerations for future research of NET for the treatment of migraine.

Following the PRISMA guideline for scoping reviews, co-author (TR), a medical librarian, searched the MEDLINE, PsychInfo, Embase, and Cochrane Central Clinical Trials Registry databases for peer-reviewed articles describing NET to treat migraine and other chronic pain conditions. Each citation was reviewed by two trained independent reviewers. Conflicts were resolved through consensus.

Overall, a NET curriculum consists of the following topics: pain does not equate to injury, pain is generated in the brain, perception, genetics, reward systems, fear, brain plasticity, and placebo/nocebo effects. Delivered through individual, group, or a combination of individual and group sessions, NET treatments often incorporate exercise programs and/or components of other evidence-based behavioral treatments. NET has significantly reduced catastrophizing, kinesiophobia, pain intensity, and disability in overlapping pain conditions. In migraine-specific studies, when implemented together with traditional pharmacological treatments, NET has emerged as a promising therapy by reducing migraine days, pain intensity and duration, and acute medication intake.

NET is an established treatment for pain conditions, and future research should focus on refining NET for migraine, examining delivery modality, dosage, components of other behavioral therapies to integrate, and migraine-specific NET curricula.