Description
This webinar - held on 30 March 2023 - was produced through a collaboration of the IASP's Pain and Placebo Special Interest Group and the University of Maryland, Baltimore, USA - in particular - the University of Maryland School of Nursing's Placebo Beyond Opinions Center and the University of Maryland's Center to Advance Chronic Pain Research. All three groups are aligned on advancing unbiased knowledge of placebo effects by promoting interdisciplinary investigation of the placebo phenomenon and nurturing placebo research.
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The IASP defines pain as "an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage" to better articulate the biopsychosocial dimensions of this phenomenon. While our understanding of pain has greatly evolved over the past decades, there are still fundamental questions that need to be addressed. This webinar explored these questions related to pain such as assessing how similar pain, desire, and emotion are in their biological mechanisms and if a change in thinking can alter sensory perception and/or disease-relevant physiology.
Participants included:
-- Tor Wager, PhD, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA
-- Luana Colloca, MD, PhD, University of Maryland School of Nursing, USA (host)
Contributors
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Tor Wager, PhD
Tor is the Diana L. Taylor Distinguished Professor in Neuroscience at Dartmouth College, and the Director of Dartmouth’s Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience laboratory, the Dartmouth Brain Imaging Center, and the Dartmouth Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. Professor Wager’s research centers on the neurophysiology of affective processes - pain, emotion, stress, and empathy - and how they are shaped by cognitive and social influences. One focus area is the impact of thoughts and beliefs on learning, brain function, and brain-body communication. Another focus is the development of brain biomarkers that track and predict affective experience, including pain and other clinical symptoms. A third focus is on statistical, machine learning, and computational techniques that provide a foundation for new models of the affective brain. Professor Wager’s laboratory conducts basic research in these focus areas and applies the resulting techniques and models to collaborative, translational research on clinical disorders and interventions. In support of these goals, Professor Wager and his group have developed several publicly available software toolboxes (see http://canlab.github.io). He also teaches courses and workshops on fMRI analysis and has co-authored a book, Principles of fMRI. More information about Tor and his lab’s activities, publications, and software can be found at http://canlab.science.
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Luana Colloca, MD, PhD
Luana is a MPower Distinguished professor at University of Maryland, School of Nursing, Baltimore, Director of the TL1 program, Chair of the Pain and Placebo Special Interest Group for the International Association for Study of Pain (IASP) Society and the Treasurer for the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies of Placebo (SIPS). Colloca holds an MD, a PhD in Neuroscience and a master in Bioethics. She completed a post-doc training at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden and a senior research fellowship at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda. Prof. Colloca received several prestigious awards such as the IASP Wall Patrick Award for basic research on pain mechanisms. Colloca leads an NIH-funded research portfolio on endogenous pain modulation including placebo/nocebo effects and other nonpharmacological interventions such as virtual reality. Colloca and her teamhave been published in top-ranked journals including JAMA, NEJM, Biological Psychiatry, Pain, and Lancet Neurology among others.