Saturday, Jun 28: 9:00 AM - 10:15 AM
1655
Symposium
Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre
Room: P2 (Plaza Level)
Pain is a major public health issue with serious economic and societal impact. Diagnosis and treatment remain often unsatisfying and lengthy. Exponential focus is now on the development of objective measures of pain, which could help inform diagnosis and define new treatment targets. However, pain, especially chronic pain, is associated with important individual differences. These differences affect the diagnosis and treatment of pain. Therefore to improve pain management, any objective measure needs to capture the high heterogeneity, which is often observed in the symptoms and symptoms' intensity. Using traditional fMRI analyses has proven to fail to properly reflect this heterogeneity. Therefore novel approaches are needed to accurately capture this heterogeneity. This symposium will first provide a complete overview of the issue, including the need for objective measures and the challenge in addressing individual differences. Alternative approaches, including prevalence analysis, clustering-based analysis, multimodal analysis, and machine learning based approaches, will be introduced and discussed in the context of individual differences. The importance of addressing individual differences is not limited to pain. Extensive individual differences have been highlighted in other fields of research, including emotions and other sensory modalities. In consequence, the topic of this symposium has the potential to benefit researchers outside of pain research.
1. Upon completion of this symposium, participants will be familiar with the importance of studying individual differences.
2. Upon completion, participants will be able to assess the advantages and disadvantages of cutting-edge statistical approaches to investigate individual differences in pain.
This symposium is open to all researchers interested in learning more about innovative approaches designed to objectively measure pain and its associated symptoms. It might be of particular interest for researchers focusing for attendees interested in individual differences and wanting to try new approaches to better capture them.
Presentations
Understanding a first-person conscious experience from a third person perspective represents a major philosophical challenge. However, in the case of pain, it represents a major real-world challenge with substantial implications for the diagnosis and treatment of the conditions giving rise to pain. In many instances, the underlying tissue or nervous system injury either remains inaccessible to conventional diagnostic techniques and/or the pain arising from such conditions is remarkable disassociated from the assessment of degree of tissue damage. Psychophysical assessments provide a structured tool for allowing the communication of the first-person experience to a third person observer. However, the responses of pain measurement tools have long been frequently dismissed, particularly in women and minoritized groups. Thus, there has long been a desire from both patients and providers for an objective measure of pain. Early neuroimaging studies showed substantial promise in achieving this objective. However, more recent evidence with adequately powered studies of diverse participants suggests the goal of an objective measure of pain remains profoundly difficult to accomplish and underscores the need for novel approaches.
Presenter
Robert Coghill, Cincinnati Children's Hospital
Division of Behavioral Medicine and Clinical Psychology
Cincinnati, OH
United States
Individual differences in pain are extremely prevalent. A better understanding of their underlying mechanisms is needed to improve pain management. Recent findings based on commonly used statistical approaches failed to capture these differences in pain, suggesting a clear limitation of these techniques to do so. There is a strong need to define innovative approaches that can better capture individual heterogeneity. For example, patterns of similar brain activation across individuals can be extracted using prevalence analyses. Other approaches based on clustering techniques can also be used to characterize pain phenotypes. These approaches might provide new insight into individual differences in pain and result in the definition of more individualized treatment targets.
Chronic musculoskeletal pain in adolescents is linked to structural and functional brain alterations that are challenging to measure. This presentation describes a multimodal neuroimaging approach combining task-based functional MRI and diffusion MRI to investigate these changes. Unlike analyzing these modalities independently, combining them through structural-functional coupling offers a more comprehensive understanding of how white matter connectivity supports task-evoked brain activity. Structural-functional coupling analyses were applied to data from a cohort of adolescents with chronic musculoskeletal pain, to identify subgroups based on coupling patterns, self-reported questionnaire measures, and task-evoked brain activity. This approach enhances the ability to link brain mechanisms to pain phenotypes and supports the development of biomarkers for chronic pain in adolescents.
Pain perception varies dramatically across individuals. The same pain stimulus may be intolerably painful for someone, yet barely perceivable by another. What neural activity underlies such dramatic individual differences? In this presentation, I will classify individual differences in pain into two broad types: pain sensitivity and pain discriminability, corresponding to the absolute and difference thresholds in psychophysics. I will then explore how neuroimaging can uncover biomarkers of pain sensitivity and discriminability across individuals. Specifically, I will discuss (1) how large-scale fMRI datasets help build replicable and generalizable biomarkers of pain sensitivity, and (2) how selective biomarkers can be developed to decode pain discriminability from neural responses to nociceptive stimuli. Together, this presentation illustrates the potential of neuroimaging to advance our understanding of individual variability in pain.
Presenter
Li-Bo Zhang, Istituto Italiano Di Tecnologia Genova
Italy