One of the major challenges in treating pain is to keep an acute event from becoming chronic. What is more, “[o]ur lack of understanding of how acute pain becomes chronic pain has limited our ability to target effective preventive and treatment strategies to patients,” said NIH Director Francis Collins, MD, PhD. So the NIH has launched the Acute to Chronic Pain Signatures (A2CPS) program.
The A2CPS researchers hope to identify individual patient features that will provide clinically meaningful, predictive “signatures” of transition or resilience to chronic pain. They will collect data from patients with acute pain associated with surgery or musculoskeletal trauma. Using neuroimaging, high-throughput biomedical measurements, sensory testing, and psychosocial assessments, they will form a dataset to help predict which patients will develop chronic pain. Those signatures could be valuable in guiding precision medicine and perhaps reducing reliance on opioids, the NIH says.
A2CPS will have an anticipated $40.4 million 4-year budget supplied by the NIH Common Fund.