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American Pain Society releases new pain research agenda
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The American Pain Society recently announced it has released an agenda in support for underfunded research for developing new pain therapies, according to a press release.
The report, published in the Journal of Pain, states, “The most direct path to achieving dramatic advances in pain treatment is through substantially increased investment in pain research and education, which would enable the pursuit of an aggressive translational pain-research agenda.”
According to the press release, five broad goals were identified in the report:
- To develop novel pain treatments that enhance clinically meaningful pain relief and functional improvement with acceptable adverse effects.
- To expedite progress toward the prevention, diagnosis and management of pain conditions.
- To optimize the use of access to currently available treatments that are known to be effective.
- To understand the impact of health policies and systems on pain treatment.
- To improve pain management through education research.
Potential new therapies would include interventions targeted at blocking pain signals at their sources, therapeutics that disrupt or reverse molecular pain mechanisms and therapeutics that modulate or mimic endogenous pain control mechanisms.
The authors also recommended more research in the area of making currently available treatments safer, according to the release.
“Our work in developing the pain research agenda showed that even the most optimistic estimates indicate that pain research is woefully underfunded relative to its prevalence, disease burden and economic toll,” co-author and former APS president, Roger B. Fillingim, PhD, said in the release.
“Chronic pain must become a national priority. Much larger investments have been made, such as decoding the human genome and halting the HIV epidemic, and the results have been nothing short of transformative,” APS President Gregory Terman, MD, PhD, professor of anesthesiology, University of Washington Medical School, said in a press release. “Is the daily suffering of 100 million Americans less important?”
Reference: www.americanpainsociety.org.