About the Acute to Chronic Pain Signatures (A2CPS) program
Chronic pain is a significant public health problem and the prevention of chronic pain after an acute pain event is a major challenge in pain management. In addition, the number of people who transition from acute to chronic pain after an acute pain event has contributed to the current opioid epidemic. The ability to predict which patients are more likely to be susceptible or resilient to the development of chronic pain would provide a crucial step towards the development of personalized patient prevention strategies, and could inform future clinical trials, improve the success of trials, and transform acute pain management care to prevent chronic pain.
The National Institutes of Health have launched a four-year $40.4 million Acute to Chronic Pain Signatures (A2CPS) program to investigate the biological characteristics underlying the transition from acute to chronic pain. The A2CPS consortium will consist of 5 Centers, 4 data acquisition Centers and a Data Integration and Analysis Center (DIRC) which will be based in the Department of Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University (PI Lindquist). The A2CPS consortium will perform a longitudinal prospective study on 3,600 subjects who experience acute pain from either a specific surgical procedure or a specific musculoskeletal trauma. Neuroimaging, high-throughput biomedical measurements, sensory testing, and psychosocial assessments will be collected periodically after the acute pain event to form a comprehensive data set.
This initiative is funded through the NIH Common Fund, which supports cross-cutting programs that are expected to have exceptionally high impact.