News

William Maixner, DDS PhD, gave an update from the American Pain Society at the 13th Annual Pain Consortium Symposium on June 1. View the presentation.

APS Urges Expanded Insurance Coverage for Interdisciplinary Pain Care

Treatments that target only specific cell types may potentially relieve chronic pain from neuroinflammation while avoiding the side effects of systemic drugs.

On May 30-31, 2018, the inaugural meeting of the Pain Management Task Force will feature speakers from HHS, VA, DoD, ONDCP as well as perspectives on pain management from experts in the field.

APS endorses compromise legislation in the U.S. Senate amending provisions of the Marijuana Effective Studies Act of 2016, which removes excessive regulatory barriers inhibiting researchers from obtaining marijuana plants for studies to assess the drug's medical effectiveness and safety.

Dentist and pain researcher William Maixner, DDS, PhD, now serves as president of the American Pain Society.

Using genetically encoded biosensors in mice, the authors demonstrate that opioid hormones activate receptors at the cell surface and cell endosomes, while opioid therapeutic drugs activate these sites as well as receptors in the Golgi Apparatus in neurons. This difference in signaling location could be the reason why opioid therapeutic drugs produce severe negative side effects, while endogenous opioid hormones do not.

In 2016, of the 115 Americans who died each day from an opioid overdose, nearly half were using prescription opioid medications. Studies have estimated that just a 10% reduction in surgery-related opioid prescribing in the U.S. would result in 300,000 fewer people each year transitioning to long-term use and make 332 million fewer opioid pills available for potential diversion and misuse.

APS Director-at-Large, Dr. Mark Wallace, appears in a CNN special that explores treating patients with medical marijuana and how it can help solve or ease the opioid epidemic. In the special Dr. Sanjay Gupta interviews a patient of Wallace’s who was diagnosed with an inflammation of the spine.

The Translational Research Institute on Pain in Later Life (TRIPLL) at Weill Cornell Medical College is offering a web-based training resource for health professionals, researchers and community practitioners interested in various topics related to pain in later life. Webinars are interactive and feature diverse investigators and highly-trained practitioners who present their expertise on various topics.

The NINDS Innovation Grants to Nurture Initial Translational Efforts (IGNITE) and Cooperative Research to Enable and Advance Translational Enterprises for Biologics (CREATE Bio) program will be having a webinar on April 16, 2018 from 1:30-2:30 pm EST to inform applicants about an area of special interest. NINDS would like to accelerate the development of pain treatments with little or no potential for misuse or addiction.

In this RELIEF podcast, neuroscientist and science journalist Stephani Sutherland met with Robert Coghill, APS Board Member and recipient of Frederick W.L. Kerr Basic Science Research Award, at the 2018 Scientific Summit to discuss his work and that of others aiming to decipher how the brain contributes to chronic pain.

The American Pain Society (APS) today endorsed aggressive action by the National Institutes of Health to accelerate scientific solutions to help resolve the nation's opioid crisis by doubling funding for research on opioid misuse and pain management.

In this RELIEF podcast, neuroscientist and science journalist Stephani Sutherland met with Thorn at the 2018 Scientific Summit to discuss her recent clinical trial as well as other areas of pain psychology. 

It seems like new legislation related to opioids and pain management is introduced in Congress every day. Numerous bills are being considered in the House and Senate.

There will soon be an NIH study section dedicated to the review of basic science grants on Pain. At the March 26 Advisory Council meeting, the Center for Scientific Review formally chartered the Somatosenosry and Pain Systems (SPS) Study Section. We are very appreciative to the Center for Scientific Review for hearing the voices of pain scientists, who have long hoped for a dedicated Study Section to help improve the quality of peer review of Pain grants submitted to the NIH. CSR is now working on implementation of the SPS study section with a target of having it in place for the January 2019 Council round (grant reviews occurring in fall, 2018).

The 2018 National Rx Drug Abuse and Heroin Summit, National Institutes of Health Director Francis S. Collins, MD, PhD, announced the launch of the HEAL (Helping to End Addiction Long-term) Initiative, an aggressive, trans-agency effort to speed scientific solutions to stem the national opioid public health crisis.

APS commends Congress for bipartisan passage of the 2018 Omnibus Spending Bill, which gives the National Institutes of Health an 8.8% budget increase, its largest in 15 years. The bill authorizes $500 million for research on opioid addiction, new alternative pain treatments, and pain management.

Medicare is putting into place on April 2nd a rule that will deny payment for long-term, high-dose opioid prescriptions. The change is designed to limit opioid addiction risks, but many patients, patient advocates, physicians and scientists oppose the move as arbitrary and harmful.

Lawmakers concluded that the research community was not adequately consulted about this change and that the policy could have "long-term unintended consequences," including unnecessary regulations and the inappropriate inclusion of non-clinical trials in NIH's clinicaltrials.gov database.