The 26th Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Pain Society
Washington Convention Center, Washington, D.C.

Preconference Programs

Wednesday, May 2

1–5 pm
Washington Convention Center

(001) Integrating Individual Responder Approaches and Pharmacogenetics for Clinical Pain Research

Faculty: Raymond Dionne, DDS PhD (Moderator); Janet Woodcock, MD; John Farrar, MD PhD
Panelists: Barbara Mittleman, MD; James Witter, MD PhD

Although pain is one of the most common reasons that people seek health care, it remains a uniquely personal experience that cannot be measured objectively. Pain continues to be an unmet healthcare need that is often poorly controlled in chronic diseases and at the end of life. The evaluation of patient-reported outcomes in clinical trials is usually measured in the individual, but then grouped for comparison of different interventions. Not only is information about each individual’s response to the intervention lost, the magnitude of the outcome in terms of the effectiveness for achieving some clinically important endpoint is also missed (i.e., did the treatment meaningfully improve the patient’s symptoms or quality of life, and was this effect balanced by the incidence and severity of adverse events for that patient?). Factors that contribute to interindividual variability include gender, ethnicity, temperament, genetic polymorphisms, and variability in past pain experiences that may distort the use of standardized pain scales. The combined influence of these individual factors require valid and reliable individualized clinical outcome measures, possibly leading to the identification of subgroups of patients whose underlying molecular genetic mechanisms provide a favorable therapeutic ratio for analgesic interventions. The objectives of the workshop are to develop a research agenda to validate individual responder outcomes for evaluating analgesic interventions, to suggest strategies for identifying subpopulations of patients with genetic risk factors prognostic for analgesic outcomes in individuals, and to propose approaches to evaluate the relationships between pain phenotype and genotype while minimizing false positives often observed in association studies.

There is an extra fee for this event. See Registration Form.