Internet-based Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Chronic Pain
Unknown statusNot applicableNCT03409302
View the official record on ClinicalTrials.gov Recruiting status changes often. Contact the study team listed on ClinicalTrials.gov, and talk to your doctor before joining a study.
This study has no listed site in Canada in this snapshot. It is included as part of the worldwide chronic pain corpus.
Brief summary (from the registry)
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) delivered face-to-face is an empirically supported intervention for the management of chronic pain (CP). However, increasing demands for cost reduction in healthcare services in addition to obstacles regarding physical access to treatment, highlight the need for innovative, cost-reducing, digital self-management interventions. Poor user engagement nonetheless, is a significant challenge often faced in digital interventions, which often results in poor adherence or even non-completion in treatment. In addition, very few digital trials appear to plan for adherence a-priori, when designing an intervention. To date there are only two ACT-based digital interventions for CP demonstrating significant improvements in pain-related disability and increased functioning, yet with small to medium effect sizes and poor adherence rates. However, several limitations of the studies such as the absence of a-priori adherence planning and lack of investigation of underlying mechanisms, makes it difficult to draw clear conclusions on the effectiveness of this new treatment modality for chronic pain and warrants further research. This study seeks to: a) explore how a brief adherence-planned digital ACT-based intervention for CP management, compared to an active control group and a wait-list control group improves targeted study outcomes such as functioning and quality of life, and b) investigate which processes of change mediate the targeted study outcomes. It is hypothesized that the brief ACT-based digital intervention in comparison to the active control group and wait-list will result in increased functioning, improved quality of life and reduced pain intensity. The results of the study are expected to shed more light on the utility of planning for adherence in digital interventions and effectiveness of ACT-based digital interventions and their underlying mechanisms in the management of CP.
Study details
- Official title
- The Effectiveness of a Brief Digital ACT Intervention for Chronic Pain
- Conditions
- Interventions
- Behavioral: ALGEApp (Brief iACT intervention)
- Behavioral: Active control group
- Sponsor
- University of Cyprus
- Start date
- 2018-01
- Primary completion
- 2018-03
- Sex
- All
- Age range
- from 18 Years
- Healthy volunteers
- true
- Results posted
- No results posted in this snapshot
- Total sites listed
- 0
Eligibility criteria
Show eligibility criteria (verbatim from the registry)
Inclusion Criteria: 1. Age 18 years or older 2. At least 3 months chronic pain duration, 3. At least a pain intensity score of ≥ 4 prior to the intervention (assessed by an 11 point numeric rating scale (NRS; Dworkin et al., 2005) ranging from (0) 'no pain' to (10) 'pain as bad as the participant can imagine'. 4. Users to have undergone medical assessment within one year, 5. Official medical diagnosis on the type of chronic pain that users suffer from, 6. Regular access to a computer/tablet and internet 7. Sufficient knowledge of the Greek language. Exclusion Criteria: 1. Comorbidity with a serious medical condition other than chronic non-malignant pain (e.g., complete paraplegia or tetraplegia, heart or vascular diseases, malignant pain such as cancer etc.), which may interfere with participation. A neurologist will be consulted and candidates will be excluded if their medical condition is regarded as significantly interfering with their participation. 2. Recent episodes of active psychosis, manic episodes, substance use disorder and suicidal ideation. Assessment will take place using selected single items from mini-SCID (mini - Structured Clinical Interview for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Karekla \& Panayiotou 2010). Candidates who respond positively to one or more of the assessed mini-SCID items will be excluded from further participation and will receive information over the phone with advice to seek help, along with relevant information on available services from their local community mental health services or their general practitioner.
Source: ClinicalTrials.gov (US National Library of Medicine), snapshot October 2026. Check the registry for current recruiting status. Record: https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT03409302