The European Research Council funds a UB project to understand the mechanisms and predict the onset of chronic pain in adolescents
Specifically, the funded project aims to analyse the possible causes of chronic pain in adolescents between the ages of fifteen and eighteen who have undergone musculoskeletal surgery. López-Solà states that in some cases “pain continues to affect a significant number of adolescents, without any apparent medical explanation, which impairs their quality of life, mobility and academic performance”. “It is therefore necessary — she adds — to study the brain to understand this pathology and to prevent pain, if possible, or treat it with a greater probability of success”.
The project, called AMIGO (“A multi-ingredient brain function model predicting chronic pain in youth: a window into future well-being”), aims to identify, before surgery, which adolescents will develop chronic pain and through which specific neurophysiological mechanisms they will do so. “The aim is to study brain function during states that are specifically relevant to chronic pain to obtain fundamental information to understand the mechanisms that maintain pain in each young person and, thus, to be able to direct treatment more successfully”, says the researcher.
The expert notes that they will “follow a subgroup of patients to see whether the brain vulnerability mechanisms identified before surgery are amplified in people with persistent pain and whether they diminish in response to an effective treatment”. The researchers believe that “the study, based on precision functional neuroimaging, may mark a turning point in the understanding of chronic pain in adolescents”.
The ERC’s Consolidator Grants support projects conducted by researchers with seven to twelve years of research experience since obtaining their PhD. In this call, 328 researchers were recognized with a total funding of €678 million.