Chronic Itch Relief Through Affective Touch in Romantic Couples

Abstract

Chronic itch is a common condition in dermatological diseases that severely impacts the patients’ quality of life. The majority of them also suffer from psychiatric disorders. It is a heavy burden especially for those that are not responsive to anti-histamine medication. Therefore, there is an urgent need for treatment to be developed for these itch patients. Recent research has uncovered a promising technique for reducing itch: affective touch. Affective touch represents a slow velocity (3 cm/s), gentle touch, which was found to alleviate electrically induced itch. Both itch and affective touch are mediated by unmyelinated nerve fibres in the hairy skin of humans, called C fibres, and they also share common brain activation areas. As this affectionate caress is most often present in romantic relationships, we hypothesise that itch will be even more inhibited when affective touch is applied by one’s partner. In this study, we collected data from six couples. The participants were subjected to six minutes of electrical itch, with simultaneous affective and then non-affective touch, applied by their partner and the experimenter, respectively. A non-parametric ANOVA for a within-subjects design was conducted. The results of the study did not show any significant difference between conditions. Importantly, the low power of the experiment cannot lead to conclusive evidence. However, the trend of the results does seem to be in line with our expectations. In conclusion, future research is recommended to use larger samples to investigate whether the effect of the romantic partner’s touch can be confirmed.