PainRelief.com Interview with: Janni Leung, PhD Senior Research Fellow National Centre for Youth Substance Use Research (NCYSUR) The University of Queensland
Dr. Leung
PainRelief.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: There is increasing interest in cannabis use for medical reasons, and we want to find out how many people are using it and for what.
PainRelief.com: What are the main findings?
Response: Almost 1 in 3 of North Americans self-reported that they have used cannabis for medical reasons, with higher use reported by young adults, although chronic conditions are less prevalent in this group.
Most common reasons were to help with pain, sleep, depression and anxiety, but some reported using it to manage their drug or alcohol use and psychosis.
PainRelief.com Interview with: Daniel Myran, MD, MPH, CCFP, FRCPC Family and Public Health and Preventive Medicine Physician CIHR Fellow, Ottawa Hospital Research Institute Department of Family Medicine Innovation Fellow University of Ottawa
Dr. Myran
PainRelief.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: Canada legalized recreational, or non-medical, cannabis in October 2018. Canada took phased approach to legalization initially only allowing flower-based cannabis products and oils and after one year permitting the sale of commercial cannabis edibles (e.g. THC containing candies, baked goods, and drinks). In this study we took advantage of this phased roll out of legal cannabis to understand the impact of legalization on cannabis exposures or poisonings in children aged 0-9 years and the contribution of different types of cannabis products to these events.
PainRelief.com Interview with: Molly Candon, PhD Research Assistant Professor, Center for Mental Health, Department of Psychiatry Assistant Professor, Department of Health Care Management Director, Associate Fellows Program, Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics Perelman School of Medicine and the Wharton School University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Candon
PainRelief.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response:Insurance design for pain care, including whether treatments are covered and how generously they are covered, is an important element of access and adherence. Acupuncture therapy is a safe and evidence-based treatment for numerous pain conditions, and our team was curious if acupuncture coverage has changed in recent years given the need for non-opioid treatments during the ongoing opioid epidemic.
Professor Kim BennellFAHM Barry Distinguished Professor | NHMRC Leadership Fellow Dame Kate Campbell Fellow Centre for Health Exercise and Sports Medicine Department of Physiotherapy Melbourne School of Health Sciences The University of Melbourne, Victoria Australia
Prof. Bennell
PainRelief.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: Osteoarthritis is a common chronic painful joint condition with no cure that often leads to costly joint replacement surgery. Treatments are needed that can not only reduce symptoms but also slow structural progression of the disease in order to reduce the burden of knee OA. There are no approved disease-modifying treatments available at present.
Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injections have become a widely used treatment for knee osteoarthritis (OA) in recent years despite the fact that the evidence to support their effects is limited and not of high quality. For this reason, clinical guidelines currently do not recommend PRP for the management of knee osteoarthritis.
To address this gap in knowledge, our study aimed to compare the effectiveness of PRP injections to reduce knee pain and slow loss of medial tibial cartilage volume over a 12-month period. We did this by conducting a clinical trial of 288 people with mild to moderate knee OA. The study included a placebo group where participants were injected with saline into the knee. Participants and the injecting doctors were blind as to whether PRP or saline was injected into the knee.
PainRelief.com Interview with: David M. Dunaief, M.D. Principal Investigator MedicalCompassMD.com
PainRelief.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: As an internist focusing on dietary intervention, I have been caring for patients with chronic diseases for the past 12 years. Many of my patients have had rapid, marked improvements when they adhere to my LIFE (Low Inflammatory Foods Everyday) diet. The diet, as well as objective evidence that it reduces systemic inflammation (lowers serum C-reactive protein levels), has been described in the peer-reviewed publications:
In addition to improving migraines, the diet has improved symptoms and blood chemistries in patients with high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, cancer, auto-immune diseases, inflammatory bowel disease, and others. In this case report, we describe a patient who suffered from debilitating migraines for 12.5 years, and who had minimal benefit from avoiding dietary triggers or medications. Within 3 months of adopting the LIFE diet, he was migraine free and remained that way for 7.5 years.
PainRelief.com Interview with: Amrita Vijay PhD Division of Rheumatology Orthopedics and Dermatology School of Medicine University of Nottingham Nottingham, UK
Dr. Vijay
PainRelief.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: We carried out this research as we wanted to see if exercise had an effect on the levels of anti-inflammatory substances produced by gut microbes and on endocannabinoids (i.e cannabis-like substances) produced by our bodies.
One of the key findings of the study is that physical exercise increases levels of the body’s own cannabis-type substances and highlights a key link between how substances produced by our gut microbes interact with these cannabis-like substances and reduces inflammation.
PainRelief.com Interview with: Rajesh Khanna, PhD Professor and Vice Chair of Research, Department of Pharmacology, Associate Director of Research, Comprehensive Pain and Addiction Center University of Arizona
Dr.Rajesh Khanna,
Starting January 2022: Professor, Department of Molecular Pathobiology Director, NYU Pain Center College of Dentistry New York University
PainRelief.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: Chronic pain conditions cause an immense burden on society due to their astonishingly high prevalence and lack of effective treatments. The National Institutes of Health estimates that nearly 100 million people in the United States suffer from chronic pain. Nearly 20-30% of patients prescribed opioids for chronic pain misuse them, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. In 2019, nearly 50,000 people in the U.S. died from opioid-involved overdoses and that number increased to nearly 70,000 in 2020. There is clearly an urgent need for non-addictive treatments for chronic pain.
The voltage-gated sodium channel NaV1.7 is preferentially expressed in the peripheral nervous system within ganglia associated with nociceptive pain. This channel modulates the threshold required to fire action potentials in response to stimuli and has been established as a key contributor to chronic pain. Chronic pain states can result from upregulated NaV1.7 expression which has been shown to occur in association with diabetic neuropathy, inflammation, sciatic nerve compression, lumbar disc herniation, and after spared nerve injury. The exact pathways leading to the dysregulation of NaV1.7 are poorly understood, but likely involve mechanisms related to its surface trafficking and regulation via protein-protein interactions.
Our previous work identified the collapsin response mediator protein 2 (CRMP2) as a novel regulator of NaV1.7 function and uncovered the logical coding of CRMP2’s regulatory functions. We found that if CRMP2 is phosphorylated by cyclin dependent kinase 5 at serine 522 and also modified by SUMOylation at lysine 374 by the SUMO conjugating enzyme Ubc9, then NaV1.7 is functional. When not SUMOylated, CRMP2 recruits the endocytic proteins Numb, Nedd4-2, and Eps15, triggering clathrin mediated endocytosis and internalization of NaV1.7. When not at the cell-surface, sodium currents are reduced, alleviating NaV1.7-associated chronic pain. This action of CRMP2 is highly selective for NaV1.7, as no effects on other voltage-gated sodium channel subtypes are observed.
Previous efforts to target NaV1.7 for pain relief have focused on development of direct channel blockers, but this approach has been unsuccessful. Disclosed reasons for failure of these NaV1.7-targeting drugs include issues with: (a) central nervous system penetration, (b) lack of selectivity (e.g., of Biogen’s Vixotrigine), (c) inadequacy of pain models, and (d) insufficient channel blockade.
These factors culminate in continued action potential firing and failure to relieve pain, which has led to skepticism regarding targeting of NaV1.7.
We hypothesized that targeting CRMP2 with a small molecule to prevent it’s SUMOylation would be a novel and effective approach to indirectly regulating NaV1.7 for the treatment of chronic neuropathic pain.
Daniele Piomelli PhD Distinguished Professor, Anatomy & Neurobiology Louise Turner Arnold Chair in Neurosciences Joint Appointment, Biological Chemistry and Pharmacology School of Medicine Director, Center for the Study of Cannabis University of California, Irvine
PainRelief.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: The pain caused by physical trauma or by surgery can disappear in a relatively short time — or linger for months or even years. In some cases, for example after open heart surgery, the percent of people who develop persistent pain can be as high as 40%. Breast and knee surgery, among others, have similar outcomes. We still don’t understand how acute pain after an injury becomes chronic.
PainRelief.com Interview with: Lewis Crawford, B.Sci (Hons), PhD Candidate Neural Imaging Laboratory | Faculty of Medicine and Health University of Sydney
PainRelief.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: This study was performed as a means to accurately and robustly define the areas of the brainstem responsible for alleviating and enhancing pain via conditioning and expectation alone, that is, the phenomena of placebo analgesia and nocebo hyperalgesia. The reason we were able to do this was by being able to access a 7-tesla ultra-high field MRI, one of only two in Australia, that allowed us to resolve the small nuclei in the brainstem which make up descending analgesic circuitry (they carry signals from your brain to your spinal cord).
We found that a central pathway, comprised of the midbrain Periaqueductal Gray (PAG) and Rostral Ventromedial Medulla (RVM), acted during both phenomena, however in opposite ways. We also identified several other nuclei as playing a role in the modulation of pain which, prior to this study, had not been explored or suggested to play a role in this context. We believe that the brainstem circuitry we defined here enables further research into mechanisms responsible for analgesia and hyperalgesia and will promote further investigation into brainstem function in humans.
PainRelief.com Interview with: Dr. Radostin Penchev Johns Hopkins Medicine
PainRelief.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: Although fewer than 600 people have travelled to space, human space travel is expected to exponentially surge with several companies now offering space excursions as well as with the establishment of the U.S. Space Force in 2019. In parallel with this effort, NASA plans to have a sustained presence on the Moon by 2028.
It turns out that more than 50% of astronauts experience back pain (termed space adaptation back pain) during their mission and are over 4 times more likely to suffer from herniated discs than the normal population. As such, physicians should anticipate a surge in space-related back pathology. More importantly, understanding the cause of back pain in astronauts may also improve the care for other austere environment populations including deep sea divers, fighter pilots and high-altitude explorers.
In this comprehensive review of the literature, we examined the epidemiology, potential causes, and treatments for spinal pain in astronauts.
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