Approved Research

Predicting transitions in pain and disability

Lay summary

The overall aim of this work is to understand why some people make transitions from good health to poor health, whereas others do not. A major barrier to understanding these transitions is that they are not simple and generally involve the interplay between many different factors. This is likely to depend on a person's genetics, their social situation, their overall health, the presence of other conditions, their diet, how well they sleep, and so on. To unravel the complexity of these relationships and to be able to develop management strategies to prevent the transitions demands analysis of large datasets with a wide range of different measures. This study aims to address the issue of transitions from the perspective of pain (e.g., transition from acute to chronic pain, from pain to recovery), function (e.g., transition from high to low physical activity with ageing), and disability (e.g., transitions in recovery and decline with neurological conditions such as stroke and Parkinson's disease). The project will involve use of state-of-the-art analysis methods to deal with the large and complex data and will take 3 years to complete. The work present major potential to improve the development of effective strategies to reduce the negative transitions (e.g., from low to high disability) and enhance the positive ones (e.g., from pain to recovery).