Center for Innovation in Pain Care News

Principal Investigator Jacques E. Chelly, MD, PhD, MBA, will receive funding to establish a Center of Excellence with Heron Therapeutics. This multidisciplinary center will be dedicated to education and research related to perioperative pain management with a special focus on non-opioid approaches and minimization of opioid prescription.

“Hierarchical Clustering by Patient-Reported Pain Distribution Alone Identifies Distinct Chronic Pain Subgroups Differing by Pain Intensity, Quality, and Clinical Outcomes” was recently published in PLoS One and featured in several news publications.

Shiv K. Goel, MD, who was awarded a $79,825 grant from the Shadyside foundation for his study entitled “Music Therapy for the Treatment of Perioperative Anxiety and Pain.”

The NIH Heal Initiative website featured the project “Proof of concept study to treat negative affect in chronic low back pain” led by Ajay D. Wasan, MD, MSc, as part of the Back Pain Consortium Research Program.

Benedict Alter, MD, PhD, who has been awarded a UPMC Competitive Medical Research Fund grant for his project “Integrating Brain and Behavioral Measures of Endogenous Analgesia to Personalize Treatment in Chronic Pain Management” to start on July 1, 2021.

Dr. Wasan was named in the specialty of pain medicine.

Nominees for this award are recognized for their extraordinary contributions to the science, teaching, or practice of regional anesthesia and/or pain medicine.

The study, which will be conducted as a single-center, prospective, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial at UPMC Shadyside, will explore aromatherapy’s potential to modulate perioperative anxiety.

Two recent news articles published on WebMD.com and Parade feature interviews with Ajay D. Wasan, MD, MSc, about pain management.

The project “AtTACC Pain” was one of three projects to receive $50,000 in the 2020 Pain Research Challenge.