One in four people suffers with chronic pain and the current best practice for pain management is opioids, which can be over-prescribed and highly addictive.
That's why researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas are studying non-opioid treatments for persistent pain.
Dr. Theodore Price, founding director of the Center for Advanced Pain Studies at UTD, recently joined KERA's Ron Corning to discuss chronic pain and alternative treatment options researchers at the university are working on.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You can hear the full conversation but clicking the 'listen' button above.
What is chronic pain?
The formal definition of chronic pain is pain that lasts than than three to six months, depending on who you ask, but I think most people in the field view chronic pain as pain that outlives an initial injury. So if somebody had a surgery, the injury was fixed during the surgery, the surgery itself has healed and people still have pain, most people would refer to that as chronic pain.
About 25% of the population suffers from some sort of chronic pain, and it's not always a visible ailment, right?
That is the amazing thing about chronic pain is that, statistically, it will affect almost everybody at some point in their lifetime. It is a real silent epidemic because people often deal with it alone, or they sometimes will remove themselves from interacting with others because they find it very hard to go about daily life. Low back pain is the most common by far, and then headaches and migraine headaches are also extremely common.
These issues also affect people at different times of their lives. Migraines typically affect a huge number of women at the height of their professional productivity and can really, in addition to causing people a lot of pain, have a big impact on many different aspects of their life. Arthritis is also extremely common when people get a little bit older, in most cases for knee and hip arthritis. Rheumatoid arthritis is still a big problem, too, and the disease modifying drugs that almost everybody gets are usually pretty successful in reducing inflammation, but many people still have pain.
What has been your biggest breakthrough so far when it comes to treating chronic pain without opioids?
I think our biggest breakthrough has been methodological actually. We have developed this amazing collaboration with the Southwest Transplant Alliance, which is a organ procurement organization that recovers organs for transplant here in Dallas. We work with them to recover dorsal root ganglion and spinal cords from organ donors. This has allowed us to transition from doing pre-clinical, basic science research that was primarily using animal models, to being able to study how pain and peripheral neuropathies like diabetic neuropathy affects the human nervous system directly.
The selfless gift these people give, and that their families also commit to, really is amazing. It saves lives but it also allows us to do research that we really didn't think was possible before we started — and the amount of insight that we can get is really next level.
Do you feel optimistic that your research is leading us further away from the opioid crisis that has gripped people in a profound way for so long?
We've been working very hard to do that. We have these amazing grants from the National Institute of Health through an initiative that was started about six years ago called the HEAL Initiative, Helping End Addiction Long-Term. One of these grants allowed us to develop a non-opioid medication based on a target that we discovered from the studies I've been telling you about.
In the last six years, that's gone from an idea to now a drug that completed phase one safety trials in humans at the end of 2025. So, now that drug should be going into the efficacy phase two trials for chronic pain. If we're successful, this could be a drug that may potentially be a cure for certain types of neuropathic pain.
Ron Corning is the host of KERA's forthcoming talk show, NTX Now. Got a tip? Email Ron at rcorning@kera.org.
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