Dual Treatment of Chronic Pain and Insomnia Within an Interdisciplinary Pain Rehabilitation Program

Dual Treatment of Chronic Pain and Insomnia within an Interdisciplinary Pain Rehabilitation Program

The aim of this project is to develop a dual treatment model for chronic pain and insomnia by combining evidence-based approaches for each condition, addressing an important gap in the research on and treatment of chronic pain.

Insomnia is frequently comorbid among patients with chronic pain. Estimates suggest that 50-80% of patients receiving treatment for chronic pain also report significant insomnia. Patients with comorbid insomnia and chronic pain are at higher risk of negative outcomes compared to individuals without insomnia. More specifically, studies have found that higher levels of insomnia are associated with increased difficulty in reducing opioid use, higher pain intensity, greater functional limitations, lower self-efficacy, higher pain catastrophizing, and more depressive symptoms compared to patients with less severe insomnia. Importantly, for patients with clinically significant insomnia symptoms, insomnia often does not improve to a meaningful extent as a result of chronic pain treatment alone. Accordingly, there is a significant need for dual treatment models that address both chronic pain and insomnia.

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) CBT-I is viewed as the "gold standard" treatment for clinical insomnia. In this treatment model, insomnia is viewed as originating from varying precipitating events (e.g., illness, life changes, pain symptoms), but maintained through sleep-related behaviors that increase sleep-related arousal, fragment sleep, and condition an association between bed/nighttime and wakefulness. Accordingly, CBT-I uses conditioning principles to decrease pre-sleep arousal and recondition a pattern of rapid, consolidated sleep. The key components of this intervention are sleep restriction therapy (SRT), which limits time in bed initially to the duration of actual sleep per night, and stimulus control (SC), which involves modification of factors that associate bed/nighttime with wakefulness (e.g., time awake in bed, wakeful activities in bed).

Several randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have been conducted to evaluate this treatment among patients with insomnia and a variety of comorbid chronic pain conditions.8 When compared to usual care or a waiting list control group, patients assigned to receive CBT-I have reported significantly better improvements in insomnia symptoms. In addition, results indicate that the effects of CBT-I delivered to patients with chronic pain have been maintained or improved over time.