Project Details
TRR 289: Treatment Expectation - The impact of expectation on health outcome
Subject Area
Social and Behavioural Sciences
Medicine
Medicine
Term
since 2020
Website
Homepage
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 422744262
Patients’ expectations about treatment benefits are important modulators of health outcomes. An individual’s expectation can substantially shape symptoms and disease progression and influence the efficacy and tolerability of treatments. The ultimate goal of the proposed CRC is to generate the knowledge base for the systematic utilization of patients’ expectation in order to optimize therapeutic strategies and thereby improve health outcomes. To achieve this goal, we will characterize the psychological and neurobiological mechanisms underlying positive and negative expectations and their impact on treatment outcomes, and how expectation effects interact with actual (e.g., pharmacological) treatment effects. We will initially focus on the pain and affective system, as experimental and clinical evidence indicate substantial and clinically relevant effects of expectation on patient-reported treatment outcomes in both normal and pathological forms of pain and affective processing. Using a highly interdisciplinary and translational approach and guided by a unified theoretical framework, we will conduct basic experimental studies in animals, healthy volunteers, as well as clinical proof-of-concept studies in patients to investigate the mechanisms and effects of treatment expectation alone and, importantly, in combination with gold standard treatments. The research program is designed around the long-term perspective of the CRC, in which the focus of the three funding periods will gradually shift from characterizing the mechanisms underlying treatment expectation to applying gained insights in clinical applications. During the first funding period, we will focus on the psychological and neurobiological mechanisms and interindividual differences in the effects of expectation on health outcomes in healthy volunteers and patients. To ensure rapid transfer into the clinical context, mechanistic studies will be complemented by small-scale translational clinical proof-of-concept studies testing approaches to modulate treatment expectation in patient groups with chronic pain or depression. In the second funding period, we will then focus on the dynamics of expectation. In particular, we will investigate how expectation is revised and updated based on patients’ treatment experience. We also aim to go beyond pain and depression to test for commonalities and differences in the mechanisms and effects of treatment expectation in disorders with more physiological and objective rather than subjective and patient-reported treatment outcomes (e.g., autoimmune or cardiovascular diseases). Finally, this will allow us to systematically utilize expectation in a context-, patient-, and disease-specific manner in the third funding period. An additional important spin-off during this final funding period will be the optimization of clinical trial designs with the aim to improve drug discovery and development.
DFG Programme
CRC/Transregios
Current projects
- A01 - The role of dopamine and anxiety in treatment expectation and its effect on pain (Project Head Bingel, Ulrike )
- A02 - Positive and negative expectation can shape tonic pain: the role of brain activation patterns and active placebos (Project Head Büchel, Christian )
- A03 - Prefrontal mechanisms underlying the effects of positive and negative expectation on pain: a combined EEG-fMRI study (Project Head Rose, Michael )
- A04 - Effects of negative expectation on visceroception and visceral pain (Project Head Elsenbruch, Sigrid )
- A06 - Effects of expectation on emotional processing across the lifespan: the role of fronto-limbic function and attentional control (Project Head Brassen, Stefanie )
- A07 - The role of dopamine, reward learning and prefrontal activity in expectation-induced mood enhancement (Project Heads Endres, Ph.D., Dominik M. ; Müller, Erik M. )
- A08 - The effects of nasal esketamine and treatment expectation in acute major depressive disorder: a pharmacological fMRI study (Project Heads Falkenberg, Irina ; Kircher, Tilo )
- A09 - Effects of positive and negative prior treatment experience on antidepressant response in rats: from behavior to neurobiological mechanisms (Project Heads Schwarting, Rainer K.W. ; Wöhr, Markus )
- A10 - Neurobiological mechanisms of negative treatment expectation in an animal model of endotoxin-induced sickness behavior (Project Heads Engler, Harald ; Schedlowski, Manfred )
- A11 - Effects of positive treatment expectation on sickness symptoms in a human model of acute systemic inflammation (Project Head Benson, Sven )
- A12 - Expectation-induced enhancement of treatment effects on pain, itch and quality of life in psoriasis patients (Project Heads Schedlowski, Manfred ; Sondermann, Wiebke )
- A13 - Optimizing treatment expectation in chronic low back pain by observing others: a fully balanced placebo design (Project Head Klinger, Regine )
- A15 - Disentangling pharmacologic and expectation effects in antidepressant discontinuation - a randomized, balanced open-hidden trial (Project Heads Kircher, Tilo ; Nestoriuc, Yvonne )
- A16 - The modulatory role of communicated treatment rationale on treatment expectation effects in depression (Project Head Rief, Ph.D., Winfried )
- Z01 - Central Tasks (Project Head Bingel, Ulrike )
- Z02 - Central scientific project: Overarching Psychometric and Neuroendocrine Assessments (Project Heads Engler, Harald ; Müller, Erik M. ; Rief, Ph.D., Winfried ; Schedlowski, Manfred )
- Z03 - Central scientific project: Neuroimaging (Project Heads Bingel, Ulrike ; Büchel, Christian ; Spisak, Ph.D., Tamas )
Applicant Institution
Universität Duisburg-Essen
Co-Applicant Institution
Philipps-Universität Marburg; Universität Hamburg
Participating University
Helmut-Schmidt-Universität
Universität der Bundeswehr Hamburg; Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen
Universität der Bundeswehr Hamburg; Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen
Spokesperson
Professorin Dr. Ulrike Bingel