Grünenthal Foundation awards i3S researcher
Joana Barroso, a researcher at i3S and PhD student in Neuroscience at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto (FMUP), recently won a grant from the Grünenthal Foundation to study chronic pain, specifically pain associated with knee arthrosis. An amount of 10,000 euros, the grant will allow the continuation of work that aims to study the brain circuits of patients with chronic pain and how they relate to pain.
«Chronic pain is a condition that affects about 30% of the Portuguese population. It is common that even after an intervention, which resolves the pathology, the patient continues to feel pain. Currently, we believe that the brain not only adapts to chronic pain but also its individual characteristics that influence the development of it», explains Joana Barroso. «We want to explore how this condition is linked to the brain to improve not only the diagnosis but also the treatment of chronic pain», she adds.
Through frequent follow-ups and various magnetic resonances, the researcher explains it is possible to evaluate the behavior of the central nervous system before and after surgical intervention. «We know that in chronic pain there is adaptation of the central nervous system and it is safe to say that chronic pain should be understood not only as a percutaneous alteration but also as a consequence of the reorganization of the central nervous system. The brain seems not only to adapt and reorganize itself in pain, but also to determine, on the basis of individual a priori characteristics, a greater risk for its chronification», says Joana Barroso.
It should be noted that in 2012, the team of Prof. Vania Apkarian of Northwestern University in Chicago, with whom the researcher collaborates on this project, showed that based on the connectivity between two specific regions of the brain it is possible to determine who develops chronic pain after an acute stimulus.
In arthrosis after prosthesis surgery «the vast majority of patients are pain free, however, between 20-30% of patients have complaints, although apparently there is no stimulation (the prosthesis is doing well from an orthopedic point of view). We believe that the unknown agent in this equation is the brain, and the sensitization to the pain that occurred previously», explains Joana Barroso.
The researcher continues: «We performed a functional magnetic resonance before and after knee arthrosis surgery in order to understand what changes when there is recovery, and to see if there are any predictive factors for who has the highest risk of keep pain». The possibility of finding neuromarker in the images «allows us not only to find which systems of the brain are responsible for pain, but also to open new avenues to their treatment», she concludes.
Joana Barroso works in the Biomedicine Department of FMUP, specifically in the Experimental Biology Unit, and is a member of the research group “Pain Research” of the i3S. This project is being developed in partnership with the Orthopedics Service of the São João Hospital Center, the Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, and the Imaging Center - SMIC Boavista.