Led by College of Nursing Associate Dean for Research, Dr. Hyochol “Brian” Ahn, and CON Faculty member, Dr. Hongyu Miao, FSU Nursing has recently been awarded a supplemental grant funded by the National Institutes of Health to further research and understanding of how patients exert neural control over pain-related behaviors. This supplement provides additional funding to the R01 project, totaling over $2.8 million dollars of funding over three years.  

The project team, consisting of Ahn (Nursing), Miao (Nursing), Dr. Geraldine Martorella (Nursing), Dr. Brad Schmidt (Psychology), and Dr. Colm Connolly (Medicine) will study the usage of home-based mindfulness-based meditation paired with transcranial direct current stimulation to better understand maladaptive changes in pain-related brain function. “This study will inform the development of future larger-scale mechanistic studies to better understand how to target adaptive changes in brain function that underlie changes in pain-related behaviors to optimize the therapeutic effects of home-based nonpharmacological interventions for pain management.,” Ahn said.

Research has shown that clinical pain is associated with pain catastrophizing behavior. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) imaging responses suggests greater maladaptive changes in pain-related brain function in patients with knee OA including greater changes in resting and pain-evoked cerebral blood flow. The study uses non-invasive and painless brain stimulation coupled with mindfulness-based meditation to better understand underexplored causal processes of pain-related brain function in older adults with knee osteoarthritis. This method has many advantages as a home based, easy to administer, and non-invasive approach to pain management. 

Ahn, who also serves as Director of the College of Nursing’s Brain Science and Symptom Management Center, combines his expertise in nursing, medicine, and computer engineering to uniquely address critical gaps in research on brain mechanisms underlying pain and other chronic symptoms and to deliver nonpharmacological intervention to improve pain and symptom management. 

For more information on the Brain Science and Symptom Management Center, visit https://bssmc.fsu.edu/