Do you have chronic pain? Or are you a health care provider for patients who suffer from chronic pain? You may be able to help improve the communication between pain patients and health care providers by participating in this study.
Chronic pain affects more than 100 million Americans per year, resulting in extraordinary personal and societal costs in diminished quality of life, lost productivity and health care consumption. For many of these patients, available treatments are inadequate, creating a dire need for the development of more effective treatments. The transition from acute to chronic pain is driven by changes in the processing of sensory information in both the peripheral and central nervous system, a form of maladaptive plasticity that can be considered a separate disease entity in its own right. Research programs at UNECOM on the neurobiology of pain use molecular, physiological, pharmacological and behavioral approaches to understand the mechanisms that underlie the development of chronic pain and to develop new therapeutic interventions.