The study, conducted at the Ontario Science Centre, looked at more than 1,000 children and adolescents from ages eight to 18. While boys and girls reported the same frequency of persistent pain – lasting three months or more – teenage girls experienced more anxiety and tended to catastrophize over pain to a greater degree than their male peers.  

“Boys who experience pain may feel less comfortable expressing their feelings because they are deemed socially inappropriate – or it may be that boys simply experience less anxiety in relation to pain,” says study lead author Samantha Fuss (MA ’10), a PhD student in psychology at 91ŃÇÉ«. “Even teenage girls who haven’t experienced persistent pain showed significantly higher levels of pain anxiety than boys their age.”   

Overall, 27 per cent of participants reported experiencing persistent pain. The study is published in the latest issue of the journal .

Study co-author Joel Katz, a 91ŃÇÉ« psychology professor and , says more research is needed to understand the psychological factors relating to pain in youth. 

Left: Joel Katz

“Persistent pain in children and teenagers isn’t a rare occurrence. There are gaps in our understanding of the time course of pain and the developmental trajectories,” Katz says. “For example, how does the presence of pain in these life stages relate to pain in adulthood?”

Researchers looked at psychological variables including anxiety, anxiety sensitivity and pain catastrophizing – a tendency to worry about pain and feel helpless in the face of it.

Boys 12 to 18 years of age were significantly more likely to experience persistent pain than younger boys, while there was no difference between age groups for girls.

Fuss points out that girls more frequently seek medical attention for illness and pain than do boys – which makes their findings all the more intriguing.

“Our sample wasn’t drawn from a clinical setting – such as interviewing patients at a walk-in clinic,” she says. “This is a fairly representative sample of Toronto children and adolescents who happened to be visiting the Science Centre with their parents.”

Katz notes that the greater prevalence of chronic pain in women versus men may be tied to psychological factors that appear in childhood.

“Anxiety sensitivity is thought to be a vulnerability factor for the development of chronic pain. The finding that girls had higher levels of anxiety sensitivity than boys may partly explain why the prevalence of chronic pain is greater in women than men,” he says.

“It’s a complex web to untangle in terms of physical versus psychological,” says Fuss. “Is it that the psychological experience of pain differs between the sexes – or even age groups – or is it differences in the physical experience of pain? How are they linked? These are certainly important questions in terms of diagnosis and pain management.”

Fuss’ research is supervised by Katz. Their work is funded by a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Canada Graduate Scholarship to Fuss, and a Canada Research Chair in Health Psychology to Katz.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91ŃÇɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Pillai Riddell will share her research with the public as one of the featured presenters in a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Café scientifique taking place tonight from 6 to 8pm at the Gladstone Hotel in downtown Toronto. The event, "Ouch! Preventing and Managing Pain in the Real World", is hosted by the Centre of Nursing at The Hospital for Sick Children in collaboration with CIHR.

Right: Rebecca Pillai Riddell

Joining Pillai Riddell in this informal discussion between leading researchers and the public are Anna Taddio, a professor in the Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Toronto and a pharmacist at the Hospital for Sick Children, and Denise Harrison, chair in Nursing Care of Children, Youth & Families at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario and the University of Ottawa. The event will be moderated by Tom Blackwell, senior national reporter for The National Post.

Pillai Riddell runs 91ŃÇɫ’s Opportunities to Understand Childhood Hurt Laboratory (OUCH Lab) and is an associate scientist in The Hospital for Sick Children’s Department of Psychiatry Research. She has two research programs on the go, both looking at pain in infancy.

Her first, Understanding Chronic Pain in Infancy, is designed to define what chronic pain is in infancy, to establish a baseline that everyone can agree on, because right now there isn’t one, and to develop a measure to assess it. Chronic pain goes beyond acute pain, which is more temporary in nature – heel pricks, regular needles or post-operative – and can have implications on a person’s life into adulthood.

In collaboration with researchers at 91ŃÇÉ«, the University of Toronto, The Hospital for Sick Children as well as Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and the Women’s College Hospital, and armed with a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) operating grant, Pillai Riddell is looking at infants in the neonatal intensive care units of hospitals. This is where many premature infants experience ongoing pain as medical procedures are performed. “With that comes an enormous amount of iatrogenically induced pain or pain that is a result of the life-saving treatments.”

The goal is to better understand chronic pain in infants by talking with parents, health professionals and national and international experts, which can then be used to develop a conceptual model of chronic pain in infants, followed by a reliable and valid assessment measure, and finally strategies for infant chronic pain management.

Café scientifiques started in the late 20th century as an informal discussion about scientific subjects. They were never intended to be lectures. The same holds true for CIHR Café scientifiques. They provide insight into health-related issues of popular interest to the general public, and in turn provoke questions and provide answers.

For that reason, the CIHR Café scientifiques are all about accessibility. They involve interaction between the public and experts in a given field at a café, a pub or a restaurant. If you want to take part in a CIHR Café scientifique, there is no need for you to have a science degree. You just need to have a deep-rooted desire to talk about a particular health subject. That way you could learn how health research may provide answers to any questions that are on your mind.

Can't be there in person? Join the group on Facebook.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91ŃÇɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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“From Cats Eyes to Headaches: Adventures in Neuroscience” will take place Thursday, Nov. 11, from 2 to 3:30pm at 214 Calumet College, Keele campus. RSVP by Nov. 10 to smiceli@yorku.ca. Everyone is welcome to attend. Light refreshments will be served.

Left: Fran Wilkinson

In her research, Wilkinson, a member of the at 91ŃÇÉ«, has examined the mechanisms of face and object recognition in the visual brain and how vision changes during aging. She is among the researchers working in the Sherman Health Science Research Centre.

“Throughout my career I have been fascinated by how the visual pathways of the brain capture and interpret the visual world. In this talk, I will briefly describe the sometimes winding path my own research career has taken, examining this central question in neuroscience from a variety of angles, using new technologies as they have come into being,” says Wilkinson.

“I will then discuss my current work on vision and migraine headache as an example both of the interface between basic and clinical neuroscience, and of the role of serendipity in research.”

The Faculty Research Profile Series, presented by Calumet College, features eminent 91ŃÇÉ« faculty speaking on their broad research interests rather than about a single narrow topic. Audiences will hear what professors have devoted their careers to studying, how they do what they do and why.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91ŃÇɫ’s daily e-bulletin

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91ŃÇÉ« researchers have identified a cell-signalling process that stimulates blood vessel growth and may help break the cycle of diabetes by making it easier for patients to exercise.

Professor Tara Haas (right) and colleagues in 91ŃÇɫ’s Muscle Health Research Centre studied stimuli that can cause blood vessels in muscle to grow. Their research aims to improve outcomes for patients with peripheral artery disease, a condition that compromises circulation, often seen in patients with high blood pressure or Type 2 diabetes. In the worst-case scenario, lack of blood flow can eventually result in amputation of a patient’s foot or lower leg.

"Type 2 diabetes is one of the major disease states in which muscles don’t get enough blood. This leads to muscle cramps and pain. It becomes a vicious cycle because patients are in so much pain, they can’t do the exercises that would help improve their condition," says Haas, professor in 91ŃÇɫ’s School of Kinesiology & Health Science, Faculty of Health. "Ultimately, this research furthers our understanding of how we can jump-start the growth of new vessels, and may lead to drug treatment regimens that will help patients get back on their feet," she says.

Blood flow itself can be used as a regulator for inducing the growth of new vessels. This process, known as "shear stress-induced angiogenesis", is not fully understood by scientists.

Eric Gee, a PhD candidate in kinesiology & health science and lead investigator on the study, found that increased blood flow jump-starts endothelial growth receptors within the vascular system, in turn causing the activation of a key protein enzyme, p38 MAPK (mitogen-activated protein kinase).

"Experiments suggest that p38 activation is needed to induce the growth of new blood vessels via shear stress-induced angiogenesis," says Gee.

As part of the study, Gee mimicked the effects of blood flow by pumping fluid over the surfaces of endothelial cells in order to document changes in p38 activation. He also used the drug Prazosin in an experiment involving rats; the drug dilates arteries and induces chronically elevated capillary shear stress in skeletal muscle. The rats were then given an inhibitor to block the protein identified in cultured cells. Gee found that the inhibitor worked, suggesting that the p38 protein is important in conveying the signals which stimulate the growth of vessels.

"By learning which healthy pathways are normally activated, we are furthering our knowledge of how to replicate this response in humans," Gee says. "It also gives us an idea of markers we can look for in disease states where these signals may not be getting activated, for example, high blood pressure or Type 2 diabetes."

The article, "p38 MAPK activity is stimulated by vascular endothelial growth factor receptor 2 activation and is essential for shear stress-induced angiogenesis", was published online in the Journal of Cellular Physiology in September 2009. It will appear in print in January 2010.

From YFile - 91ŃÇÉ«'s daily e-bulletin

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