Stoke Mandeville Spinal Research (SMSR), at the National Spinal Injuries Centre, Aylesbury, has announced that it will fund £8,964 towards a project that will use electroencephalograph (EEG) prediction techniques to determine whether a newly injured person with spinal cord injury (SCI) is likely to go on to suffer from central neuropathic pain (CNP).
The project is jointly funded by SMSR and the charity Spinal Research. Led by the University of Glasgow, and involving patients at the National Spinal Injuries Centre (NSIC), Stoke Mandeville, and the National Spinal Injuries Unit (NSIU), Glasgow.
The two-year study aims to identify those patients who will go on to develop chronic neuropathic pain in the future and facilitate the development of preventative treatment as a result.
The study will focus on how brain activity related to CNP in people with SCI develops over time and will use EEG to measure this activity as early as possible following their injury, before they start to develop neuropathic pain, which is believed to be a consequence of a gradual build-up of hyperexcitability in the nerves, eventually leading to this debilitating condition.
Lead researcher at the University of Glasgow, Dr Aleksandra Vuckovic, said: “Neuropathic pain is extremely hard to treat. We propose to define predictive markers of central neuropathic pain (CNP) based on related brain activity accurately measured by electroencephalograph (EEG). Early EEG markers of pain will be used to create a machine learning system used to identify the risks to each newly injured patient enabling us to recommend effective preventive treatment.
“We will record EEG in more than 60 people across two spinal units in Scotland and England early after their spinal cord injuries and analyse brain activity of those who have and have not developed pain within the first six months. With this data, we create a ‘machine learning algorithm’ able to predict the risks of any patient in the future developing CNP. This will provide clinicians with the ability to better prescribe preventive treatments.”
Commenting on their funding announcement, SMSR Trustee Chair, Richard Tolkien, said: “We are delighted to fund this important piece of research which aims to predict and prevent debilitating pain that can often be a complication of spinal cord injury. We hope it will make a big difference to improving the everyday lives of people living with spinal cord injury.”He added: “The award emerged from the first round of calls in SMSR’s recently established grants programme.
“This programme marks a big step in our approach towards developing research that leads the way in SCI and that has the potential to lead to brand new treatments and therapies for those many people and their families living with SCI day-to-day.”
