Project description
Understanding and preventing chronic pain in adolescence
Chronic pain originates mainly in adolescence, a period of intense brain development characterised by increased susceptibility. With this in mind, the ERC-funded AMIGO project aims to study how stress and brain function interact to determine which individuals will develop chronic pain. Currently, the number of young people with non-relenting and crippling pain is increasing. Therefore, the AMIGO project will monitor adolescents after surgery, using cutting-edge neuroimaging, precise fMRI, and machine learning to track changes in pain pathways over time. The early detection of brain and stress markers will improve diagnosis times and enable more targeted and successful treatments.
Objective
Chronic pain is endemic and difficult to treat. The first surge occurs in adolescence, a critical period for brain development associated with high vulnerability. The number of adolescents with disabling pain has soared, and in most cases, pain persists into adulthood, strongly impacting long-term wellbeing. The impact of chronic pain in adolescence urgently calls for a better understanding of its causes, longitudinal predictors, and underlying biopsychosocial mechanisms. Psychosocial and physical stress in youth are critical risk factors for chronic pain in adolescence. Yet it is unknown how they interfere with individual brain physiology to predict who will develop chronic pain. I will use a longitudinal design involving adolescents undergoing major surgeries, coupled with an experimental neuroimaging approach, precision fMRI and machine learning methods to: (i) test the directionality of the association between risk factors, brain physiology and future onset of chronic pain (WP1); (ii) identify a neurophysiological multi-ingredient model that predicts, before surgery, who will (and via what mechanisms) develop chronic postsurgical pain (WP2); and, in a subset of pre-selected patients, (iii) test whether target neurophysiological pathways track pain along subacute and chronic pain phases and after treatment (WP3). I hypothesize that target brain pathways during pain, multisensory unpleasantness and self-evaluation in an affective context will: (i) synergistically predict future onset of pain at the individual adolescent level; (ii) be associated with major risk sources, (iii) exacerbate with chronic pain and attenuate after effective treatment. The results will lay foundational tools that can be used prospectively for early identification of (patho)physiology predicting future pain and patient subtypes. AMIGO has the potential for a profound impact on understanding, early detection, and mechanistically informed treatment recommendations in high-risk adolescents.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- medical and health sciences clinical medicine surgery
- medical and health sciences basic medicine physiology pathophysiology
- natural sciences computer and information sciences artificial intelligence machine learning
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-COG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
08007 Barcelona
Spain
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