UCLA www.ucla.edu has developed a new database featuring hundreds of brain scans and other key clinical information to help researchers tease out similarities and differences between many chronic pain conditions.
NIH helped fund the database with $300,000 and the Gail and Gerald Oppenheimer Family Center for Neurobiology of Stress at UCLA will serve as the main hub for the new “Pain and Interoception Imaging Network” (PAIN). The database is the first ever standardized database for brain imaging associated with chronic pain.
According to Dr. Emeran Mayer, Professor of Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine and Executive Director of the Family Center for Neurobiology of Stress, “Ongoing research is currently limited since most institutions can only support small studies on their own and lack access to large samples of patients. In addition, there is no standardization of acquired data, making it difficult to combine brain scans from multiple investigators obtained from different scanners, techniques, and sets of clinical data.”
The PAIN network will include information from more than a thousand patients. In addition to brain scans, researchers will have access to clinical and biological information on patients. The data includes symptom measures, psychosocial factors, gene expression, immune system information, data on bacteria in the intestines, and environmental data. Researchers will now be able to develop large overlapping data sets to pinpoint similarities and differences among chronic pain conditions and to correlate brain scans with clinical metadata.
Researchers will be able to pick out distinct patterns from the scans of individuals with each pain condition and combine the data with additional information provided by the network. It will then be possible to assess how chronic pain manifests differently between men and women, across the life span, or between conditions.