The Role of Gratitude in Spiritual Well-being in Asymptomatic Heart Failure Patients
The authors in this study examine the existing relationships between spiritual well-being, gratitude, mood, fatigue, sleep, inflammation as well as specific well-being in 186 patients with stage B asymptomatic HF. In behavioral cardiology, a lot of interest has emerged in investigating the relationships between various positive attributes such as gratitude and spirituality and clinical outcomes. In regards to this spirituality and gratitude are being embraced as part of multidisciplinary approaches needed to treat heart failure. The 186 men and women used as samples in this study were enlisted from the veteran affairs san Diego health system as well as the University of California San Diego medical centers (Mills et al., 2015).
The findings revealed that gratitude in asymptomatic HF patients was related to better sleep and mood, lower inflammation and fatigue as well as more efficacy. Spirituality was as well associated with each of these, except the inflammation index. Gratitude was also found to fully mediate the beneficial impact of spiritual wellbeing sleep on depressed mood and sleep. Based on the results of this study gratitude promotes wellbeing and better cardiovascular health in heart failure through enhancing both psychological and subjective wellbeing. Gratitude also enhances health through efficient perceptions of day-to-day life activities from adverse to positive. Lowering depressive moods is also necessary since they are related to improved risk of mortality as well as cardiovascular hospitalization. However, it is crucial to note that despite the positive psychological associated with gratitude it is not entirely beneficial for all individuals under every circumstance (Mills et al., 2015).
Effects of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) on brain connectivity supporting catastrophizing in fibromyalgia
This study aimed at assessing the impact of CBT on the brain circuitry underlying hyperalgesia in fibromyalgia patients. It also aimed at exploring the aspect of treatment-related reduction in catastrophizing as a contributing factor to the normalization of clinical improvement. Cognitive-behavioral therapy enhances improvements in pain outcomes by reducing hyperalgesia as well as pain-related catastrophizing. Nevertheless, the neural foundations of these CBT results remain unclear. The sample consisted of 16 high catastrophizing fibromyalgia patients. These participants were randomized to four weeks of individual treatment with either cognitive behavioral therapy or fibromyalgia education conditions. The subject in this study participated in 2 separate visits. These included an imaging visit and a behavioral visit. Medical history information and standard demographic information were collected using self-report. Questionnaires included baseline questionnaires and outcome measures (Lazaridou et al., 2017).
The results of this study support the earlier findings showing that individual cognitive behavioral therapy in fibromyalgia patients leads to lasting improvements in pain. They also show that a decrease in catastrophizing may act as a crucial process factor in determining improvements in pain. The neuroimaging results in this study also support the growing field of literature showing associations between clinical results in fibromyalgia and the extent of the relationship between the anterior insula cortex and primary somatosensory areas. The result also suggests that cognitive-behavioral therapy decreases dysfunctional brain states as well as advanced clinical outcomes. Based on these findings the CBT effectiveness may come from its ability to decrease catastrophizing as well as normalize primary somatosensory regions and salience processing areas. The study has some important strengths including carefully matched education conditions. However, it also has some limitations that need to be addressed for future studies. For instance, the researchers failed to formally measure the amount of time the patients continued practicing certain skills during and following the end of the treatment program (Lazaridou et al., 2017). This study is also limited by the small sample size applied in this study. In regards to this, future studies with larges sample sizes will be required.