PrePain: Prospective study aimed at finding risk factors for long-term pain by combining biological and registrybased data

Long-term pain is a major public health issue in Sweden and is responsible for extensive suffering and high sickness absence.

Even though pain have a considerable impact on both the individual as well as the society there are still many unanswered questions.

The aim of this postdoc project is to answer one of the most central questions, why do some humans is going to develop long-term pain and others do not.PrePain is a prospective cohort study where large amount of brain imaging data will be collected and combined with registry data from Swedish registries.

Overall, this creates a unique opportunity to identify risk factors for individuals to develop long-term pain.

PrePain reuse brain imaging data from pain-free individuals and use the registries to follow the information entered for these individuals through the Swedish registries. In this project we will extract registry-based data for the 200 first individuals in the PrePain database.

This information will be the basis for an analytical model, which purpose is to identify risk factors for the development of long-term pain.Brain imaging information combined with information on the individuals quality of life and self-rated pain sensitivity will be analyzed together with information regarding sociodemographic and socioeconomic factors.

Through this analysis, we hope to be able answer  which factors is the key factor in the development of long-term pain.