Research summary
Chronic pain affects 8 million people in Canada and costs our economy $40 billion annually in health-care costs and lost productivity. Many of those affected suffer from pain caused by damage to the nervous system—and this neuropathic pain is notoriously difficult to treat. As Canada Research Chair in Neural Coding, Dr. Steven Prescott is uncovering how pain signals are normally encoded by the nervous system and how that coding is altered in chronic pain states.
He and his research team are combining sophisticated experimental and computational techniques to shed light on how various parts of the nervous system—such as specific molecules in a neuron, or individual neurons in a network—interact to control the flow of pain signals from the skin to the brain. Their aim is to uncover the basis for and the consequences of changes in neuron response to stimuli, ultimately advancing efforts to develop better treatments for chronic pain.