A new tool to measure hope in the clinic
Researchers have developed and validated a new nine-item questionnaire, the Brief Inventory of Treatment Expectations in Chronic Pain (BITEC), designed to reliably classify patients’ expectations about treatment outcomes. Using Item Response Theory and data from over 1,100 adults with chronic pain, the study found that BITEC scores could distinguish between high and low expectations with high accuracy. The tool also revealed that expectation levels varied significantly across different pain phenotypes, with higher symptom severity often linked to higher expectations for treatment success.
Why it might matter to you:
As a researcher focused on the neurobiology of placebo effects in chronic pain, this validated clinical instrument provides a direct translational bridge from your preclinical models to human patient assessment. The BITEC offers a standardized, theory-grounded method to quantify a key psychological variable—treatment expectation—that is central to the placebo analgesia you study. Incorporating such a tool could strengthen the design of future clinical trials and help stratify patients in studies investigating how expectations modulate pain perception and therapeutic outcomes.
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