While an understanding of neural circuits in healthy volunteers provide insight into normal circuits, understanding the dynamic changes occurring in patients with chronic pain is a bigger challenge. These changes may involve the sensory experience itself (e.g., the development of burning pain or allodynia). The changes may also involve systems involved in the emotional experience in pain such as unpleasantness, depression, or suffering. The use of imaging techniques to identify pain-activated areas in humans that may provide opportunities to follow the effectiveness of new therapeutic approaches, and the information may improve the diagnosis and initiate novel treatment strategies for pain. Objective indices of brain function will provide a targeted method for the evaluation of analgesics in these patients and also objective diagnosis and ability to follow the progression of the disease. Prediction of chronic pain, for example, following surgery may indeed be possible. Such evaluation with imaging techniques include functional (e.g., fMRI), anatomical (e.g., MRI for cortical thickness), and chemical (e.g., spectroscopy).

current programs

• trigeminal neuropathy
• migraine
• complex regional pain syndrome
• pain in psychiatric disease

relevant p.a.i.n. group publications