Marina López-Solà, lecturer at the UB's Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences and director of the Pain and Emotion Neurosciences Laboratory at the Institute of Neurosciences (UBneuro), has received funding of nearly two million euros for studying the brain mechanisms that cause chronic pain in adolescents. Her project has received one of the Consolidator Grants from the latest call of the European Research Council (ERC), as announced today.
Specifically, the funded project aims to analyse the possible causes of chronic pain in adolescents between the ages of fifteen and eighteen who have undergone musculoskeletal surgery. López-Solà states that in some cases "pain continues to affect a significant number of adolescents, without any apparent medical explanation, which impairs their quality of life, mobility and academic performance". "It is therefore necessary - she adds - to study the brain to understand this pathology and to prevent pain, if possible, or treat it with a greater probability of success".
The project, called AMIGO ("A multi-ingredient brain function model predicting chronic pain in youth: a window into future well-being"), aims to identify, before surgery, which adolescents will develop chronic pain and through which specific neurophysiological mechanisms they will do so. "The aim is to study brain function during states that are specifically relevant to chronic pain to obtain fundamental information to understand the mechanisms that maintain pain in each young person and, thus, to be able to direct treatment more successfully", says the researcher.
