Towards personalised diagnostic biomarkers for chronic pain
Supervisors
Prof Neil Basu, School of Infection and Immunity, University of Glasgow
Dr Michele Svanera, School of Psychology & Neuroscience, University of Glasgow
Dr Donald Lyall, School of Health and Wellbeing, University of Glasgow
Summary
Chronic pain impacts over 28 million people in the UK, yet therapeutic progress remains hampered by treating chronic pain as a single condition rather than distinct mechanistic sub-types. The discipline of rheumatology typifies this scenario. Despite the evolution of advanced immune therapeutics which successfully reduce peripheral inflammation related (nociceptive) pain, chronic pain remains the most commanding of disease related concerns. This disconnect is explained by the co-existence of nociplastic pain, a biologically distinct form of pain characterised by dysfunction of the central nervous system and managed non-pharmacologically. Unfortunately, it is difficult to diagnose this distinct pain endotype on clinical grounds which in turn leads to inappropriate prescribing, a health inequality which is compounded by the disproportionate excess of nociplastic pain among females and individuals from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. Unsurprisingly, health care professionals are demanding the urgent development of tools to enable the diagnosis of nociplastic pain and subsequent personalised management of chronic pain. This project aims to address this major unmet need by harnessing pioneering functional brain MRI knowledge and data which has previously identified putative diagnostic markers of nociplastic pain employing population level analyses and now seeks to transform these inferences, with cutting edge artificial intelligence methodology, into a diagnostic tool that may be applicable to individual patients.
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