Go Back

Supporting post-surgical pain relief in Cushing’s syndrome patients with Muse

Summer Martin

October 07, 2024

Meditation’s benefits are well-documented for mental clarity and stress relief — and now it’s proving to be a key player in boosting physical healing too. In a new study presented at the Endocrine Society, patients with Cushing’s syndrome — a rare disorder caused by elevated cortisol levels — experienced significant improvements in post-surgical recovery by incorporating meditation into their routine using the Muse 2 headband. These results can have huge implications for the role of biofeedback devices in pain relief, surgical recovery, and other symptoms.

Cushing’s syndrome, surgery, and recovery

Cushing’s syndrome occurs when the body produces too much cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone. The most common symptoms of Cushing’s Syndrome are:

Weight gain
Stretch marks
Easy bruising
Mood instability
Diabetes
Hypertension
Cognitive difficulties
“Buffalo hump,” a fatty hump that develops between the shoulders

The syndrome can be caused when the body takes in too much cortisol, usually by the prolonged consumption of glucocorticoid medicines used to treat conditions like allergies, asthma, arthritis, crohn’s, or lupus. It can also be caused when the body produces too much cortisol as a result of tumors in the pituitary gland, the adrenal gland, or elsewhere in the body that impact how much cortisol the body creates.

While surgical removal of these tumors is a common treatment option, recovering from surgery is notoriously difficult. After having elevated cortisol levels for so long, patients may experience glucocorticoid withdrawal syndrome, which occurs as a result of the body adapting to lower levels of cortisol. Symptoms can include fatigue, muscle weakness, joint pain, issues sleeping, weight loss, and anxiety.

Many patients have to take recovery “one day at a time,” as Rachel Wilson, an individual who received surgery for Cushing’s Disease, shared. “I battled steroid withdrawal for the first few months post-surgery, and that was my biggest complication from the surgery.”

The opportunity for Muse and biofeedback

Since meditation has been found to improve post-surgical recovery outcomes with other conditions, a research team at the Mayo Clinic sought to uncover how guided meditation could assist curative surgical recovery for Cushing’s syndrome. The study included two groups of patients recovering from Cushing’s syndrome surgery: 27 patients were included in the intervention group and 81 were in the control group.

Patients in the intervention group were given a Muse 2 Headband and instructed to meditate for at least 10 minutes a day for three months. The Muse Headband uses EEG-powered technology to provide biofeedback in real-time, providing audio cues to keep patients focused and engaged with guided meditation programs. After three months, patients in the Muse meditation group were found to have had significant improvements in physical function and pain levels when compared to the control group.

Researcher Jasmine Saini, M.B.B.S. of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, remarked that results demonstrating “improvement in body pain and physical functioning domains in the MUSE cohort are promising.”

Enhancing the mind-body connection for improved recovery

There’s been a lot of research conducted around the effect of one’s mental state on perceptions of pain and surgical recovery. Although this study was the first of its kind to measure the impact of meditation practice on recovery from Cushing’s syndrome surgery, the results have huge implications for researchers and individuals alike.

Meditation and pain management

Pain, especially from surgical recovery, is a neurological, sensory, and emotional experience. It’s how the brain tells us that something is wrong in our body and needs attending. While physical trauma or symptoms can cause pain, an individual’s emotional state can amplify or minimize the sensory experience — a reciprocal relationship that many believe is the key to understanding and overcoming the impact of pain. Although everyone experiences and copes with pain differently, by and large the experience of pain is something everyone wants to mitigate or avoid entirely.

Mindfulness meditation has been linked to improved pain management, since it can help an individual understand and process their pain, reducing some of the fear and anxiety they might feel and providing a sense of relief. However, achieving mindfulness is no small feat. The Muse headband has been found to help individuals identify and understand pain and significantly improve their focus, mental clarity, and emotional regulation.

Mindfulness and biofeedback

What sets Muse apart from other meditation programs is the use of biofeedback in brain training sessions. For example, during the user’s session, the Muse headband tracks the brain in real-time, playing audio cues to help individuals rein in a wandering mind and maximize their focus throughout the session. The result is a significantly more effective mindfulness session, which over time can dramatically improve focus, calm and stress over time.

The future of biofeedback in medicine and beyond

The results of the study show that Muse Headbands can play a huge role in pain management in the future. But the power of biofeedback doesn’t stop there: there are a number of other ways that Muse EEG headbands can support mental and physical health. Because Muse headbands can map brain signals in real-time, they have been shown to assist with:

To find out how Muse can help support your next research endeavor, pain management program, or even help master your mind, check out our website or explore our shop to find the right headband for you.