Complex Regional Pain Syndrome SIG: Early Career Research Showcase

Description

This webinar is being produced by the International Association for the Study of Pain's Complex Regional Pain Syndrome Special Interest Group (CRPS SIG). CRPS SIG aims to:

Provide a forum for members to engage in free and frank communication on the diagnosis and management of complex regional pain syndrome with its variable clinical presentations.
Bring attention to new developments in the fields of basic and clinical research on CRPS.
Promote person-centered interdisciplinary research and care by integrating knowledge and expertise from basic science, medicine, psychology and rehabilitation science disciplines as well as lived experience (patient) reports about pain in complex regional pain syndrome.

Join us as we showcase the research of early career researchers in the field of CRPS. In this webinar, the findings of four recent studies involving patients with complex regional pain syndrome will be featured:

A community-driven project to establish the information needs of people living with CRPS.
Phenomenological interviews with consumers across Australia identified a clear need for patient information at the time of diagnosis, informing the development of an infographic co-designed with consumers, industry partners, and a CRPS pain specialist.

A longitudinal study to assess early prognostic factors in CRPS.
Preliminary results from a large ongoing prospective cohort study of patients with early CRPS will be shared, specifically focusing on the identification of biopsychosocial prognostic factors (i.e., which patients recover, and why?) and potential subtypes.

Understanding variability in body perception disturbances and how this can inform personalized virtual reality rehabilitation.
This presentation will explore how patients with CRPS can be grouped according to the severity and nature of body perception disturbances, patients’ desires for changes to their affected limb, and how changes in body perception can inform novel rehabilitation approaches.

Visuospatial attentional bias in CRPS.
Using temporal visual order tasks, visuospatial attentional bias was explored in patients with CRPS to establish whether it is specific to the personal space of the affected limb, or generalizes to the personal space of other parts of the affected side of the body.

A live Q&A session involving members of the SIG committee
will follow presentations.

Converted Webinar Start Times:
Thu 4:00am PDT
Thu 12:00pm UTC
Thu 10:00pm AEST

Participants include:
-- Colleen Johnston-Devin, PhD, School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Sciences, Central Queensland University, Australia
-- Marc-Henri Louis, MD, Institute of NeuroScience, Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium
-- Caitlin Naylor, Department of Psychology, University of Bath, United Kingdom
-- Monika Halicka, PhD, University of Bristol, United Kingdom

-- Michael Ferraro, Centre for Pain IMPACT, Neuroscience Research Australia, Sydney, Australia (moderator)
-- Janet Bultitude, PhD, Department of Psychology, Centre for Pain Research, University of Bath, United Kingdom (moderator)
-- Janne Gierthmühlen, MD, PhD, Department of Anesthesiology and Surgical Intensive Care Medicine, Pain Unit, University Hospital of Schleswig-Holstein, Campus Kiel, Germany (moderator)

Contributors

Colleen Johnston-Devin, PhD

Colleen is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Sciences at Central Queensland University, Australia, currently teaching research units in the Master of Clinical Nursing. Before academia, Colleen had acquired extensive clinical and research experience encompassing varied settings within universities, hospitals, aged care facilities, and the community across Australia, including urban, regional and rural areas. Her strong community, industry and consumer links are reflected in the diverse interdisciplinary research teams she works with and the translation of research findings into practice. Colleen’s research areas include persistent pain, chronic condition self-management, aging, lived experience, person-centered care, and research methods.
Marc-Henri Louis, MD

Marc-Henri is a 3^rd year PhD student working on prognostic factors in CRPS. After graduating as a medical doctor in 2022 at UC Louvain (Belgium), Marc-Henri commenced a thesis under the supervision of Anne Berquin (Department of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Cliniques Universitaires Saint-Luc, Brussels, Belgium). Marc-Henri currently works part-time in a pain clinic as an intern.
Caitlin Naylor

Caitlin is a PhD researcher in the department of Psychology at the University of Bath, UK. She is supervised by Janet Bultitude and Christof Lutteroth at the University of Bath, and Gavin Buckingham at the University of Exeter, UK. Caitlin’s PhD investigates body perception disturbances in health and chronic pain, with the aim of creating a new approach to CRPS body disturbances rehabilitation using bespoke body manipulations created in virtual reality. Caitlin’s wider research interests encompass body representation, multisensory perception and object interactions.
Monika Halicka, PhD

Monika is currently a senior research associate in evidence synthesis at the University of Bristol in the UK. She achieved her PhD at the University of Bath, UK, and held postdoctoral roles at the University of Liverpool, UK, and UC Louvain in Belgium. Her research has broadly focused on applying experimental psychology and statistical modeling approaches to clinical problems and populations, largely in the context of acute and chronic pain, as well as orthopedic surgery and neurosurgery. More specifically, Monika studied working memory, spatial attention, body representation, and sensory-motor adaptation in healthy individuals and people with CRPS. She also investigated factors predicting success of spinal surgery for chronic back pain.