Pain is a symptom of many disorders and chronic pain alone can present as a disease. The economic cost of pain is estimated to cost hundreds of billions of dollars annually in lost wages and productivity.
The database called the Interagency Pain Portfolio at http://paindatabase.nih.gov (IPRP) provides information on pain research and training activities supported by the federal government. The multi-agency easy to use database was initiated by six federal agencies.
The database was developed by NIH staff and members of the Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee (IPRCC). The IPRCC is a federal advisory committee formed to increase understanding of pain and improve treatment strategies by expanding pain research and encouraging collaboration across government.
Four of the agencies that helped to develop IPRP are within HHS. In addition to NIH, the agencies include AHRQ, CDC, and FDA. The other two agencies are the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense. The database is managed by the Office of Pain Policy at NINDS within NIH.
“The database provides the public and research community with tools to search for individual research projects or sets of projects grouped by themes uniquely relevant to pain,” said Linda Porter, PhD Policy Advisor for Pain at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) within NIH. “It can also be helpful in identifying potential collaborators by searching for topic areas of interest for searching for investigators.
Users of the database can search over 1,200 research projects in a multi-tiered system. In Tier 1, grants are organized as basic translations or as clinical research projects. Tier 2 sorts out 29 scientific topic areas related to pain such as biobehavioral and psychosocial mechanisms, chronic over lapping conditions, and neurobiological mechanisms.
Tier 2 categories are organized into nine research themes that include pain mechanisms, basic to clinical disparities, training and education, tools and instruments, risk factors and causes, surveillance and human trials, overlapping conditions, and use of services, treatment, and interventions.