OBJECTIVES Quantitative sensory testing (QST) has been used to elucidate the peripheral and central mechanisms that underlie changes in pain sensitivity associated with low back pain (LBP). However, it remains unclear to what degree peripheral and central changes contribute to the generation and maintenance of LBP. The aim of this study was to compare thermal pain sensitivity, measured using QS...

Stress has been shown to influence working memory. However, sex differences and the potential impact of stimulus emotionality have not received much attention. In a first experiment the effects of stress on a neutral working memory (WM) paradigm were tested in male and female participants (Experiment 1). Experiment 2 employed the same paradigm but used emotional stimuli. For this purpose, healt...

BACKGROUND Paracetamol (acetaminophen) is recommended in most clinical practice guidelines as the first choice of treatment for low back pain, however there is limited evidence to support this recommendation. The PACE trial is the first placebo controlled trial of paracetamol for acute low back pain. This article describes the statistical analysis plan. RESULTS PACE is a randomized double dum...

OBJECTIVE To determine the incidence of pelvic unleveling, foot rotation, and supine leg length alignment asymmetry in a nonclinical population and to examine the validity (sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values) of these visual tests and their relationship to self-reported back pain. DESIGN Volunteers answered a questionnaire regarding back pain and were then exami...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to investigate the psychometric properties of the Norwegian version of the Tampa Scale of Kinesiophobia in patients with low back pain and in patients with more widespread pain distribution including low back pain. SUBJECTS A total of 120 subjects, 48 with isolated low back pain and 72 with more widespread pain distribution were included. DESIGN AND METHO...

Recent studies suggest that computerized cognitive training leads to improved performance in related but untrained tasks (i.e. transfer effects). However, most study designs prevent disentangling which of the task components are necessary for transfer. In the current study, we examined whether training on two variants of the adaptive dual n-back task would affect untrained task performance and ...

Working memory (WM) is a part of human memory, the ability to maintain and manipulate information. WM performance is impaired in some neurological and psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and ADHD. Neurofeedback training is a self-regulation method which can be used to improve WM performance by changing related EEG parameters. In this paper we used neurofeedback training to improve WM pe...