How to exercise at home? Creating an individual strength and stretching workout to perform in a home environment   January 18th, 2022
It is a challenging time to stay active and to adapt our normal activities due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As working out in group or with a supervisor is not always possible, exercises at home gain popularity. We have never been walking so much as during the past year, as it was one of the only possibilities to have some social contact.
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​Does education hinder learning in patients with chronic pain? Considerations on prediction errors, learning, and expectancy violation   September 6th, 2021
Every time we experience something new, we are in the position of learning and memorising the new experience. Learning depends on several factors, including motivation, rewards, self-reflection, saliency, and repetition. One additional important aspect that seems crucial for learning is the presence of a prediction error.
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Submit your abstract for Pain Science in Motion IV Maastricht 2022, the only pain congress in the world to focus on PhD candidates!   July 15th, 2021

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Watch the symposium Pain & the Brain Across the Lifespan for free here   July 14th, 2021

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Obesity hurts: should we consider weight management within pain management?   July 9th, 2021
Before we were all held captive by the COVID-19 pandemic, another pandemic was (and still is) dominating our world. With high prevalence rates, some consider obesity the ‘real’ pandemic of the 21st century.
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Effects of a training program on the autonomic nervous system and innate immune response in autoimmune disease/spondyloarthritis   July 8th, 2021
Excessive or persistent proinflammatory cytokine production plays a central role in autoimmune diseases. Research by Kox M. et al. (1,2) evaluated the effects of a training program on the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and innate immune response.
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Quantitative sensory testing: What’s in a name?   May 4th, 2021
Over the past decades mechanism-based approach to pain management has been progressively underlined to achieve clinically meaningful improvements in pain outcomes.
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Chronic pain during COVID-19: the consequences of social isolation on pain. update   April 30th, 2021
COVID-19, a highly infectious disease that was first reported in Wuhan in China in December 2019, has definitely changed our behaviour. COVID-19 is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
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Should we start targeting the brain’s insula in the treatment of fibromyalgia?   April 27th, 2021
​In Europe, 1 in 5 people suffer from chronic pain, which means that we all know someone who is struggling with chronic pain complaints. This pain can be located in a specific region, such as migraine or chronic low back pain, but can also occur all over the body as is the case in fibromyalgia.
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Time to Change Habits. Physical Activity and the Transtheoretical Model of Behavioral Change   April 22nd, 2021
Overwhelming evidence proves the notion that reduction in daily physical activity is a risk factor behind several chronic diseases (Lacombe et al., 2019) and that individuals who are more physically active have a lower risk for the development of chronic pain (Landmark et al., 2011).
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Chronic pain as a hallmark of haemophilia. Remarkable, but true.   April 19th, 2021
​To date thousands of rare diseases have been described in medical literature and still every day researchers worldwide are working to discover and better understand new unique diseases.
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The reason why I disappoint my parents   April 15th, 2021
​“Can you have a look at my back when you visit us tomorrow?” A friend sends me a text on Saturday. My phone rings, it’s my mother calling: “My ankle hurts. I am already unable to walk normally for the whole week now. What do you think it is?”
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Culture-sensitive Pain Neuroscience Education: a means for wider pain therapy access   April 12th, 2021
Pain Neuroscience Education (PNE) is a method of educating patients about the neurophysiology of pain. It aims to re-conceptualize pain from an indicator of damage to an interpretation of input signals by the brain and nervous system.
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Differences in pain processing between patients that recover from a whiplash injury and those developing chronic pain are already present in the early phase   February 2nd, 2021
n the acute phase after whiplash injury, most patients report pain and disability. Usually, these complaints reduce gradually within the first three months (1). Some patients continue to experience pain and disability and develop chronic Whiplash Associated Disorders (WAD).
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The transition from acute to chronic non-specific low back pain: fear avoidance vs endurance   January 28th, 2021
It is important to increase our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the transition from acute to chronic non-specific low back pain (NSLBP) to improve treatments for NSLBP and individual treatment decisions in an early phase of low back pain and ultimately to prevent the development of chronic NSLBP.
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Improving care by integrating sociocultural factors within physiotherapy practice; 
the CuPiD project   January 20th, 2021
Non-specific musculoskeletal pain is highly prevalent, with point estimations up to 51% in Europe1,2. Percentages are higher in women than in men3 and most commonly represent pain in the lower back, shoulder, neck, hip or knee.
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Chronic pain during COVID-19: the consequences of social isolation on pain.   December 2nd, 2020
COVID-19, a highly infectious disease that was first reported in Wuhan in China in December 2019, has definitely changed our behaviour. COVID-19 is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The World Health Organisation has declared COVID-19 as a pandemic on March 11th, 2020 due to the rapid increase in number of confirmed cases (Wang et al. 2020).
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A mechanism-based approach for the management of pain?   December 1st, 2020
It is well known that pain is a complex phenomenon with challenging treatment. The Department of Health and Human Services recently published a National Pain Strategy, highlighting the insufficient training in pain assessment and treatment for many clinicians.
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Expectations and distraction influence pain and (pain) treatment   December 1st, 2020
The International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) defines pain as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage” (1). Pain is considered as a warning system for tissue damage.
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Moderator, Mediator, Predictor or Prognostic factor – Which factor fits my Research Question?   September 23rd, 2020
Despite the long history of usage in medicine, psychology, sociology and other sciences, the terms “moderator”, “mediator”, “predictor” and “prognostic factor” still seem to elicit discussions among researchers. Several authors have described how these terms are used interchangeably, neglecting important careful handling
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​Trait characteristics and pre-morbid contexts may contribute to the development of central sensitisation in chronic low back pain: results from a mixed methods study.   September 23rd, 2020
At the start of this research series, we were asking the clinical question as to why central sensitisation (CS) develops in some people and not in others. Is it something to do with their personal characteristics of sensitivity? Here, I want to outline what we did to begin investigating this and summarise for you the proposals we came up with.
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Can we train the chemo-brain?   September 23rd, 2020
“When I meet a friend on the street, I can’t even remember her name.”
 “Where did I leave my keys?”
 “Oh, darn I forgot my doctor’s appointment today!”
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​Pain mechanisms: is consensus on terminology and definition possible?   September 23rd, 2020
There is no doubt that musculoskeletal pain is a complex multidimensional phenomenon. At present, musculoskeletal pain diagnosis is based primarily on signs and symptoms, sometimes combined with evidence of disease, structural damage, or injury.
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SCARED BEFORE SURGERY? YOUR BELIEFS MIGHT HURT YOU!   July 15th, 2020
By now, it is a well-known fact that low back pain is a very common condition disabling a lot of people during the span of their lives, as well as that many of these people have to undergo lumbar surgery at one point or another.
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A need of subgroups within the large group of people with (chronic) low back pain   June 10th, 2020
As a physiotherapist, I see many patients with low back pain (LBP). The type of intervention varies from patient to patient, and moderate treatment effects are observed. LBP is a well-known health problem with high socioeconomic costs (Hoy et al., 2012).
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