Ángel Torrado Carvajal, 'Award for Research in Pain'

The URJC professor has received this recognition for his work in detecting chronic low back pain using imaging techniques and artificial intelligence. This award has been given by the Extraordinary Chair of Pain of the Grünenthal Foundation-University of Salamanca.

Writing/Irene Vega

The research carried out by Dr. Ángel Torrado Carvajal, professor and researcher at the Medical Image Analysis and Biometrics Laboratory of the Rey Juan Carlos University, together with a dozen other researchers, has been selected among the 43 candidates presented, due to its originality, scientific interest, relevance and proposed advances.

The Extraordinary Chair of Pain of the Grünenthal Foundation-University of Salamanca has presented the award of the XXII edition of the 'Award for Research in Pain', which is held annually to recognize and promote the most innovative projects on the knowledge of pain in the epidemiological, experimental, pharmacological and clinical fields.

The results of the award-winning work, entitled 'Thalamic neuroinflammation as a reproducible and discriminating signature for chronic low back pain', may contribute in the future to improving pain treatment in patients with chronic low back pain, since a possible way to detect the activation of this type of pathology through imaging techniques and artificial intelligence is described.

“This research supports the role of glial activation (the autoimmune response of the central nervous system) in human chronic low back pain, providing confidence in the notion that neuroinflammation can occur in this type of pain, as previously shown in studies preclinical studies and opening the door to the exploration of immunomodulatory therapies as a therapeutic approach for chronic pain”, says Dr. Torrado.

Low back pain is a common worldwide problem. According to a recent study which analyzes data from 1990 to 2017, low back pain has been the main cause of years lived with disability and continues to be a health problem worldwide.

Promote knowledge about pain

“On the one hand, as we all know, our work is published in scientific journals related to our area of knowledge; however, on many occasions it is difficult to disseminate and make our work known to the entire community, due to the large amount of literature that is generated", explained the winner, who highlights that initiatives such as these awards greatly help "to promote knowledge about pain, especially in the patients themselves and in their environment”.

This award is endowed with 4.000 euros to help the winners continue their research work. Professor Torrado points out that there is still work to be done to improve the clinical application of these findings, since the development of a "pain biomarker" was "beyond the scope of this study" and that artificial intelligence algorithms were used with the only purpose of evaluating the amount of information provided by different image features. "A study with a much larger sample size" would be necessary to continue refining the detection of these markers with imaging methods.