Congratulations to Serge Marchand for his nomination as Scientific Director of the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Santé, annonced today by government of Québec. Serge Marchand is full Professor at Université Sherbrooke, and a researcher affiliated to the Centre de recherche du Centre hospitalier universitaire de Sherbrooke (CHUS). He works in a group on Pain and Inflammation, an axis he has created and developed himself over the last few years. His work have shed light on the neurophysiological mechanisms responsible for the development and persistence of chronic pain.
New results by Sylvine Cottin, Université Laval, shows that peripheral nerve field stimulation is an effective means to alleviate overall pain by over 50% in patients with low back pain. The results were presented at the 2017 annual meeting of the North American Neuromodulation Society. Read more about this study on the Pain Medicine News website:
Listen to a recent interview with Catherine Ferland on the television show Salut Bonjour, in which she discusses the positive effects of Essentrics training for people suffering from chronic pain. View this interview by Marie-Ève Gosemick, Well-Being correspondent, here (in French only):
Read a recent article in Vox in which Jeffrey Mogil explains that “the placebo response is growing bigger over time,” but only in the US. This effect helps explain why fewer and fewer new pain drugs were getting through double-blind placebo control trials, the gold standard for testing a drug’s effectiveness.
Moy, Jamie K., Arkady Khoutorsky, Marina N. Asiedu, Bryan J. Black, Jasper L. Kuhn, Paulino Barragán-Iglesias, Salim Megat, Michael D. Burton, Carolina C. Burgos-Vega, Ohannes K. Melemedjian, Scott Boitano, Josef Vagner, Christos G. Gkogkas, Joseph J. Pancrazio, Jeffrey S. Mogil, Gregory Dussor, Nahum Sonenberg, and Theodore J. Price. "The MNK-eIF4E Signaling Axis Contributes to Injury-Induced Nociceptive Plasticity and the Development of Chronic Pain." J Neurosci 37, no. 31 (2017): 7481-7499.