Grant: Operating Grant

Patients who have suffered peripheral tissue or nerve damage from a trauma, such as an injury or illness, often experience chronic pain. Chronic pain can happen rapidly after trauma and often persists for months or even years. Effective clinical prevention and treatment is simply not available due to a poor understanding of the molecular mechanisms involved in chronic pain. There have been very few studies which have reported possible long-lasting changes during chronic pain, however we believe discovering these changes is essential to our understanding and treatment of chronic pain. In previous research the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) has been identified as a key area of the brain where changes occur in states of chronic pain. In this renewal proposal, we plan to use integrative experimental approaches to investigate long-lasting, late changes in the ACC neurons during chronic pain. Using the newly developed 'green' transgenic mice, we will identify those neurons that are responding to pain. We will then investigate synaptic changes in activated neurons in states of chronic pain. Understanding of these alterations provide basic mechanisms for how pain is processed in the brain, why chronic pain is resistant to common pain medicines, and will help guide future research into medical treatment for chronic pain.