APS’s “Pain Research Agenda for the 21st Century”
Published in the December 2014 issue of The Journal of Pain, the APS “Pain Research Agenda for the 21st Century” is a goal-oriented approach emphasizing important outcomes that must be achieved to meaningfully advance pain treatment. “The most direct path to achieving dramatic advances in pain treatment is through substantially increased investment in pain research and education, which would enable the pursuit of an aggressive translational pain-research agenda.”
“Chronic pain must become a national priority. Much larger investments have been made, such as decoding the human genome and halting the HIV epidemic, and the results have been nothing short of transformative,” said APS President Gregory Terman, MD PhD, professor of anesthesiology, University of Washington Medical School.
“Our work in developing the pain research agenda showed that even the most optimistic estimates indicate that pain research is woefully underfunded relative to its prevalence, disease burden and economic toll,” said coauthor and APS Past President Roger B. Fillingim, PhD, professor, College of Dentistry, and director, Pain Research and Intervention Center of Excellence at the University of Florida.
He noted that pain research expenditures at the National Institutes for Health (NIH) account for just 1% of the National Institutes of Health research budget or $4 per affected individual, compared to cancer and HIV for which $431 and $2,562, respectively, are spent per affected person.
“Addressing the enormous burden of chronic pain requires a fundamental change in the ways physicians, policy makers and society view the problem of pain. Achieving this change in beliefs and attitudes will require significant educational outreach for clinicians, policy makers and the public,” added lead author Robert Gereau, PhD, professor of anesthesiology and director, Washington University Pain Center, St. Louis.
Learn more about key goals and the approach to developing new treatments to help make currently used pain medications safer and more effective by accessing the Pain Research Agenda.
