Abstract
The purpose of this article was to examine the effects of acute exercise on pain perception
in healthy adults and adults with chronic pain using meta-analytic techniques. Specifically,
studies using a repeated measures design to examine the effect of acute isometric,
aerobic, or dynamic resistance exercise on pain threshold and pain intensity measures
were included in this meta-analysis. The results suggest that all 3 types of exercise
reduce perception of experimentally induced pain in healthy participants, with effects
ranging from small to large depending on pain induction method and exercise protocol.
In healthy participants, the mean effect size for aerobic exercise was moderate (dthr = .41, dint = .59), while the mean effect sizes for isometric exercise (dthr = 1.02, dint = .72) and dynamic resistance exercise (dthr = .83, dint = .75) were large. In chronic pain populations, the magnitude and direction of the
effect sizes were highly variable for aerobic and isometric exercise and appeared
to depend on the chronic pain condition being studied as well as the intensity of
the exercise. While trends could be identified, the optimal dose of exercise that
is needed to produce hypoalgesia could not be systematically determined with the amount
of data available.
Perspective
This article presents a quantitative review of the exercise-induced hypoalgesia literature.
This review raises several important questions that need to be addressed while also
demonstrating that acute exercise has a hypoalgesic effect on experimentally induced
pain in healthy adults, and both a hypoalgesic and hyperalgesic effect in adults with
chronic pain.
Key words
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: November 09, 2012
Footnotes
This work was funded by National Institutes of Health training grant T32NS045551-06 (K.M.N.).
There are no conflicts of interest, or any financial interests, to report with regard to this work for any of the authors.
Identification
Copyright
© 2012 American Pain Society. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
