Project Summary:
Pain research cuts across many disorders. Because 24.3% of Americans, one in four (100 million), will have chronic pain at some point. Moreover, 8.5% of Americans have high impact chronic pain that frequently limits their life or work activities. Chronic pain and its treatment and lost work cost the U.S. over $560 billion each year; and this cost is more than the cost of diabetes, heart disease and cancer combined. The most common types are low back musculoskeletal pain, knee and joint pain like arthritis and migraine headache. Chronic pain patients suffer a sequela of life impacting co-morbidities including anxiety, depression, sleep problems, relationship issues, and poor coping, all of which exacerbate their pain. The goal of this event is to foster pain research to help the approximately 1.4 million people in Wisconsin who suffer from chronic pain and 504,000 Wisconsinites who suffer from high impact chronic pain. Organizers will bring together basic, translational, and clinical researchers and trainees who study acute and chronic pain to improve treatment of chronic pain for Wisconsinites. A learning goal is for researchers, students, and community members to understand the basis of chronic pain and cutting-edge research and pain treatments. The professional development aim is to foster new collaborations for research and new funding proposals for NIH and other funding sources. A major professional development focus is enhancing trainee engagement, networking, and confidence in navigating federal pain research funding, as well as industry and private funding. These goals will be met through the following: 1) presentations by and attendee interactions with two world leaders in human pain research, Dr. Ted Price from University Texas at Dallas and Dr. Robert Gereau from Washington University in St. Louis; 2) presentations by junior faculty from MCW, UW Milwaukee, Marquette University, UW Madison, and Northwestern University; 3) talks and poster presentations by graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Organizers anticipate that faculty, postdoctoral fellows, students, technical staff and health care professionals will attend this event. They expect those individuals to come from not only MCW, Froedtert, Children's Hospital and the VA, but also from surrounding institutes including UW Milwaukee, Marquette University, UW Madison and Northwestern University. They expect between 300 and 400 attendees.