Give for Chronic Pain
Pain occurs from many different causes, such as a broken bone or inflammation somewhere in the body. But for 1 in 5 adults, pain remains after healing. It becomes a disease in itself and this has a huge impact on quality of life.
Unfortunately, to this day, chronic pain is very difficult to treat. In order to better help the 3 million patients in the Netherlands, Utrecht University and University Medical Center Utrecht, Eindhoven University of Technology and Wageningen University & Research are combining their expertise since 2020.
Our goal is to find new solutions for these patients. A physician, psychologist, molecular biologist, immunologist, veterinarian, neuroscientist, materials scientist, linguist, and behavioral researcher work together to treat chronic pain more precisely and effectively.
To continue this unique form of research and better help patients with chronic pain, we desperately need your support for four concrete next steps (see " in-depth" tab). Will you also help?
We want to use the crowdfunding for the following items:
How can we measure chronic pain?
Being able to measure chronic pain is important because then we can diagnose it faster, act on it and possibly even take preventive measures. We want to develop a biosensor with which we can measure neurotransmitter levels and thus possibly measure pain.
What biological mechanisms are affected?
We follow pain patients who undergo surgery on their leg or foot, for example, collect information about them via questionnaires and take biological material (think blood, feces, spinal fluid). In this material, various substances are measured and examined to see if there are differences between patients who develop chronic pain and those who recover without long-term pain as a result. From this we can learn which mechanisms are affected, which in turn can provide new insights for developing new treatments.
Can we design more patient-centered treatments?
Our research shows that there are three distinct groups of pain patients and that pain medication does not always work equally well for all of these groups. The group in which medication is least effective is a group of patients with psychosocial problems. It is not yet clear whether pain has led to psychosocial problems or whether patients with psychosocial problems actually develop chronic pain more quickly. We want to investigate more precisely how this occurs and which treatment works best for these patients: pain medication, psychosocial therapy, or a combination treatment (e.g. lifestyle change, psychologist, and medication).
Setting up platform for collaboration and knowledge exchange.
To quickly arrive at useful scientific knowledge about chronic pain, it is essential that researchers from different institutes collaborate with each other. Therefore, we want to build an online platform where researchers and health professionals with relevant knowledge about chronic pain can find each other. This will allow them to share knowledge with each other and start studies together. This is very valuable as we currently see the opposite happening. There is fragmentation in the chronic pain research field because research is being conducted at different universities by researchers who do not know each other. This hinders progress, for example because important conclusions are not included in follow-up studies or the same wheel is being invented in two places at the same time. Of course, the platform will also be accessible to chronic pain patients.
