Meaghan Creed, an associate professor of anesthesiology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, has received a $3.3 million five-year grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to investigate how alterations in the brain's dopamine system - which plays a critical role in learning and reward processing - may give rise to psychological symptoms in people living with chronic neuropathic pain.
Neuropathic pain, caused by nerve injury or dysfunction, leads to persistent pain even after the original injury has healed. It affects millions of people in the U.S. and can result from diabetes, traumatic injuries, autoimmune diseases or viral infections. Many patients with neuropathic pain also experience psychological symptoms such as loss of interest in daily activities, fatigue and difficulty concentrating, which can intensify the perception of pain, reduce adherence to treatment and diminish quality of life. Traditional antidepressants targeting serotonin and dopamine pathways are often ineffective in this population, in part because dopamine system changes associated with neuropathic pain are not well understood.
The funding will support Creed's efforts to pinpoint how, when and where dopamine signaling is disrupted in the brain as neuropathic pain becomes chronic. Using advanced brain imaging, electrophysiology and behavioral studies, her team will examine how changes in specific brain regions involved in learning and motivation contribute to mood disturbances and loss of interest in daily activities.
The long-term goal is to find new ways to treat chronic neuropathic pain, whether through drugs or brain stimulation therapies that modulate brain activity, in order to better manage its cognitive and psychological effects and improve patients' overall well-being.
