Pain and pain-related comorbidities are a leading cause of disability and disease. The treatment of pain constitutes a very problematic challenge for physicians, especially when pain becomes chronic. Understanding the mechanisms that lead to chronic pain, developing effective strategies for the diagnosis, prevention and multidisciplinary treatment of chronic pain, and creating tools to assist the development of new pharmacological treatments for pain constitutes the core activity of several research groups in the Institute of Neuroscience.
A strongpoint of our disease-oriented research in the field of pain is developing the use of a highly translational and multidisciplinary bench-to-bedside approach. This is achieved by bringing together basic neuroscientists using neuropharmacological and neurophysiological approaches to explore the low-level cellular and molecular mechanisms that may contribute to the development of chronic pain conditions, systems neuroscientists that make use of functional neuroimaging techniques combined with focused neuromodulation techniques and original methods to activate specific classes of pain receptors to explore the mechanisms of acute and chronic pain perception and its modulation in humans, cognitive neuroscientists using psychophysical and neuropsychological approaches to explore how cognition and emotions can modulate the experience of pain with the perspective of developing non-pharmacological strategies for pain management, and clinicians conducting exploratory research in patients suffering from an array of chronic pain conditions including fibromyalgia, neuropathic pain and persistent post-operative pain. Work is also conducted to optimize and evaluate the multidisciplinary management of patients with chronic pain based on the psychosocial model.