Description
The diagnosis of neuropathic pain requires abnormal somatosensory findings that are logically related to the neuroanatomy and are consistent with a specific lesion or disease of the somatosensory nervous system. In addition to obtaining pain history, as well as information on its quality, severity, and interference, the assessment of somatosensory function should comprehensive, to determine the presence of any negative neurological signs (sensory loss) or positive neurological signs (sensory gain).
This hands-on workshop will focus on the key approaches for comprehensive assessment of somatosensory function – which are a) neurological examination, as the gold standard for clinical practice, and b) quantitative sensory testing, which depending on the particular approach, can be performed in the research or clinical settings.
Specifically, one of the workshop stations will be dedicated to neurological examination by an experienced neurologist, two stations will focus on mechanical and thermal aspects of classic quantitative sensory testing, respectively, and another station will specifically focus on bedside QST approaches for more rapid quantitative assessment of somatosensory function.
Contributors
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Andrea Truini, MD, PhD
Andrea Truini is a neurologist and a pain neurophysiologist with a special interest for diagnostic techniques. He is the Chair of the Scientific Panel on pain of the European Academy of Neurology; he is the Chair of the Assessment Committe of the NeuPSIG. His research activity is manly dedicated to diagnostic tests (neurophysiology, QST, skin biopsy) in the assessment of nociceptive system in patients.
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Jan Vollert, PhD
Dr. Jan Vollert is a bioinformatician with a PhD in Neurophysiology from the Medical Faculty Mannheim of the Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg, Germany. His research focuses on the application of statistical and computational models in pain research, mainly in Quantitative Sensory Testing. He has conducted analyses of quantitative sensory testing data of patients suffering from neuropathic pain that have been largely acknowledged in the field. He is a member of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) and its Neuropathic Pain Special Interest Group, where he works on public outreach and trainee representation. He was invited speaker at congresses of the IASP, the NeupSIG, and the European Pain Federation. He published over 50 peer-reviewed papers, and his h-index is 19.
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Harriet Kemp, BMBCh, MSc, MA, FRCA
Dr Harriet Kemp is an academic anaesthetist with the Pain Research Group at Imperial College London. Her doctoral work involved the deep-phenotyping of a cohort of chronic pain patients living with HIV using quantitative sensory testing, conditioned pain modulation, corneal confocal microscopy and questionnaire-based profiling. Clinically she also works in Critical Care and has a long standing research interest in barriers to good pain assessment and management in the critically unwell. She was the Vice-Chair of the Research and Audit Federation of Trainees and is passionate about engaging clinical trainees in research.
DISCLOSURES: Nothing to disclose -
Roy Freeman, M.B.Ch.B
Roy Freeman is Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Center for Autonomic and Peripheral Nerve Disorders in the Department of Neurology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Roy's research and clinical interests are in the physiology and pathophysiology of the small nerve fibers and the autonomic nervous system. He achieved his M.B.Ch.B at the University of Cape Town Medical School in South Africa. Subsequently, he completed his neurology residency and served as chief resident in neurology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and at the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston.
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Manon Sendel, MD
Manon Sendel is part of the Division of Neurological Pain Research and Therapy at the Department of Neurology, Christian-Albrechts-Universitaet Kiel, in Germany. She is working as a neurological resident in neuropathic pain therapy.
Her research is currently focused on the pathophysiology of neuropathic pain and the application of methods like Quantitative Sensory Testing and Laser-Speckle-Contrast-Analysis.