Congratulations to FES Center Investigator Raghavan Gopalakrishnan PhD who has been awarded NIH Funding for “Alpha frequency tACS and pain avoidance learning in chronic pain patients.”
The study is in collaboration with FES Investigator David Cunningham PhD, Associate Professor of PM&R at Case Western Reserve University and at MetroHealth Rehabilitation Institute.
While adaptive avoidance of pain aids in survival, maladaptive pain avoidance could affect physical therapy and rehabilitation. In this study, researchers characterize chronic pain as a potential impairment. The team plans to take a multimodal approach to study how behavior, brain neurophysiology and autonomic nervous system (ANS) responses might be modulated, and they hypothesize that a specific type of modulation — transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) — could promote adaptive pain avoidance behavior in patients with complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS). The project is the first of its kind to investigate affective- motivational dimensions of chronic pain using tACS and will establish the foundation for future augmented protocols combining tACS with rehabilitation.
This project is funded by the National Institutes of Health Neurobiology of Pain and Itch Study Section [NPI] and is expected to take place at Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute and Case Western Reserve University.
Dr. Gopalakrishnan is Associate Staff with the Center for Neurological Restoration at Cleveland Clinic, Joint Staff at the Lerner Research Institute at Cleveland Clinic, Assistant Professor at the Lerner College of Medicine, and Adjunct Professor at Cleveland State University.
Congratulations to Dr. Gopalakrishnan and his team on this new funding and project!
