{"doi":"10.1002/14651858.cd013863","title":"Psychological therapies delivered remotely for the management of chronic pain (excluding headache) in adults","abstract":"Objectives: This is a protocol for a Cochrane Review (intervention). The objectives are as follows: To determine the efficacy and harms of remotely delivered psychological therapies compared to active control, waiting list, or treatment‐as‐usual for the management of chronic pain in adults. Background Description of the condition: Chronic pain (defined as pain lasting three months or more) is a global public health challenge. The International Association for the Study of Pain defines pain as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage\" (Raja 2020). The prevalence of chronic pain is estimated to be between 20% and 43% globally (Eccleston 2017; Fayaz 2016; Mansfield 2016; Tsang 2008), with annual societal costs per patient estimated at EUR 10,191 (Mayer 2019). Further, the challenge is increasing as the incidence of chronic pain rises in older age (Fayaz 2016; Tsang 2008). The most common types of chronic pain in adults include chronic back pain, fibromyalgia, neuropathic pain, and headache. Chronic pain can be categorised as the disease itself (e.g. fibromyalgia) and is defined as chronic primary pain, or can be associated with or a consequence of an underlying disease (e.g. chronic cancer‐related pain; Treede 2019). The personal consequences of chronic pain may be widespread, disrupting an individual’s ability to engage in everyday life and occupation, affecting social relationships, and deleteriously influencing quality of life (Dueñas 2016; Reid 2011). High levels of depression and anxiety associated with chronic pain may further complicate the emotional impact (Scott 2007). Consequently, chronic pain presents a psychological, as well as physical, challenge. Description of the intervention: Psychological therapies can address the cognitive, behavioural, and emotional factors associated with the experience of chronic pain to support self‐management and the pursuit of personally meaningful goals. These interventions contribute to improvements in mood and pain‐related disability (Williams 2020), and are recognised as an important component of effective pain management treatment (Eccleston 2013; Kerns 2011). However, patients and providers report that access to ‘non‐pharmacological’, often psychological, pain treatments is constrained by multiple barriers, including geographic and economic restrictions (Becker 2017). Consequently, provision of effective and scalable support for chronic pain remains a substantial challenge. Technological advances provide new opportunities for treatment delivery that may overcome traditional barriers and provide support remote from clinician involvement. Technology‐based delivery offers the potential to liberate healthcare expertise from its temporal, geographic, and economic restrictions through partial or complete automation of treatment. Consequently, such delivery methods may increase access to psychological therapeutic support for health conditions such as chronic pain (McGuire 2017). Relevant technologies are multiform and multiplying. Correspondingly, recent reviews emphasise the need to evaluate technology‐based delivery across multiple modalities (Heapy 2015; Slattery 2019). The encouraging support for technology‐based intervention delivery for chronic pain is often tempered by the disproportionate representation of specific modalities (e.g. Internet‐based interventions) within the evidence‐base. However, increasing investigation of technologies such as smartphones is anticipated (McGuire 2017). Consequently, rigorous verification of intervention effectiveness must match rapidly evolving technology. This review is concerned with any technology‐based delivery of psychological therapy for chronic pain that is remote from both the physical presence of the healthcare professional (HCP) and their active involvement. We employ the term ‘remote delivery’ for its superior descriptive capacity to other term","journal":"Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews","year":2021,"id":198155,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":10,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.8826,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":83236,"name":"Emma Fisher","orcid":"0000-0001-8980-3181","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":233882,"name":"Christopher Eccleston","orcid":"0000-0003-0698-1543","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":773274,"name":"Geoffrey B. Duggan","orcid":null,"position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":772784,"name":"Edmund Keogh","orcid":"0000-0002-1615-3699","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":772783,"name":"Benjamin A. Rosser","orcid":"0000-0002-1492-2706","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":34,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:50:27.616568Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}