Author: cpn091020

From Wired:

“There’s a huge amount of suffering that’s happening that we could solve,” says Ted Price, professor of neuroscience at the University of Texas, Dallas, and an author of the Brain article. “As a field, it would be awesome to start having some success stories.”

Price and his colleagues emphasize that the finding needs further study. But it suggests that a new type of migraine drug that targets a neuropeptide known as CGRP might be broadly effective for chronic pain in women, he says. Women greatly outnumber men among migraine sufferers, and women made up about 85 percent of the participants in the Phase 3 clinical trials of the three anti-CGRP drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2018. Price wonders if the anti-CGRP drugs aren’t specific to migraines—but to women. His work with mice suggests that the drugs don’t work in males, but block pain in females. “CGRP is a key player in lots of forms of chronic pain in women, not just migraine,” he says.

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UT Dallas neuroscientists, Dr. Ted Price and Dr. Greg Dussor, discuss the role of neuroscience in solving the opioid epidemic. See the full article “Can Neuroscience Stop the Opioid Epidemic?”

Every morning as many as a third of Americans wake up to a familiar stabbing back pain, a throbbing headache or some other intrusive incarnation of chronic pain. Since the late 1990s, an increasing number of Americans have sought relief by taking opioids.

Yet opioids have a dangerous dark side: addiction, abuse, overdose. University of Texas at Dallas neuroscientists Ted Price and Greg Dussor believe they can find a better way of treating pain by studying how pain actually works.

Pain research at UT Dallas was highlighted in the Spring 2018 edition of UT Dallas magazine. See the full article “Fresh Approaches”.

Three University of Texas at Dallas scientists—Drs. Ted Price BS’97, Greg Dussor, and Zach Campbell—are attacking this ever-present problem from varied angles, each with his own focus, background, and motivation for understanding it, as well as reducing and pre-empting it.

Since 2000, more than 300,000 Americans have died after overdosing on opioids, according to the CDC. Dr. Ted Price researches chronic pain at UT Dallas and he joins us to talk about arguably America’s most important public health crisis—and about the prospects for non-opioid pain medication.

Listen here.

Ted Price used to believe that people who abused opioids suffered from a failure of will. But after a freak spinal cord injury in 2006, Price’s views changed.

“I could see [the pain]. It was bright. That’s how I describe it. It felt like there was a vise around my leg that was on fire. … It was unbelievable how awful it was,” Price said.

The opioids that doctors gave him didn’t do anything to help. Surgery alleviated the pain, but the scars of how much everything hurt still haunt him.

Price believes people become hooked out of their desperation for relief — and they’ll use opioids even though the drugs are addictive and can result in overdoses. Opioid abuse “comes out of a desire that people have to make pain go away,” Price said. “And anybody that’s ever had pain for any period of time knows what that feels like. You want it to go away.”

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The tragic, high-profile death of Prince has shed much-needed light on a growing epidemic of chronic pain and prescription drug misuse in the United States.

Chronic pain affects as many as 100 million Americans — people who are hurting and desperately looking for a solution. In an effort to fight the pain, many have turned to opioids — drugs that help relieve the discomfort.

Opioids, including codeine, hydrocodone and Dilaudid, are among the most widely prescribed drugs for pain.

Unfortunately, these medicines also have led to a rise in overdoses, now a leading cause of death among Americans.

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