PainRelief.com Interview with:
Mike Rosenbluth, PhD
CEO, Swing Therapeutics
UCSF Rosenman Innovators Program
San Francisco, CA

PainRelief.com: What is the background for this study?

Response: Fibromyalgia is a chronic pain condition that affects an estimated 10 million Americans, characterized by widespread pain and other physical and cognitive symptoms that include fatigue, disrupted sleep, reduced physical function, memory problems and difficulty concentrating (“brain fog”). Clinical guidelines recommend multimodal treatment that combines medication management with non-drug approaches including cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), but only 5% of fibromyalgia patients annually end up receiving some form of CBT due to lack of trained providers or cost. 

There have been dozens of studies on CBT for management of chronic pain or fibromyalgia specifically. The majority of these studies are small, are testing an intervention that cannot scale, and are run at a single site. These studies ultimately conclude that more research should be done. We aimed to develop a product that could deliver behavioral therapy for fibromyalgia at scale and test that product in a rigorous study that was powered to demonstrate definitive clinical benefit of the treatment.

Stanza is a self-guided, smartphone-based digital therapy that delivers acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), a type of CBT.  In this multi-center, randomized controlled trial, 275 participants were randomized to receive either Stanza treatment or an active control intervention (in this case a digital symptom tracker and access to health education).