Brain Imaging Study on Biomarkers for Fibromyalgia
Status:
Recruiting
Trial end date:
2035-01-01
Target enrollment:
Participant gender:
Summary
Drugs used for managing Fibromyalgia pain have not proven to be effective and pain continues
to cost Canadians $60 billion a year without truly helping those who suffer. The study
proposes to investigate the factors related to a person that can enhance or reduce the
effectiveness of pain treatments in people suffering with Fibromyalgia pain. Treatment
response to painkillers in a person may be related to their brain, social, and psychological
makeup. The investigators aim to study these factors to identify and develop feasible and
robust indicators based on a person's biological makeup (also called biomarkers). These
biomarkers will allow doctors and researchers to predict more accurately which treatment and
prevention strategies for a particular disease will work in which groups of people. These
measures will offer new opportunities for improving treatment such as by tailoring treatment
to meet the specific needs of each patient based on his/her biological and psychological
makeup. Towards the specific aim, data will first be collected in several experimental
domains for studying treatment expectations (cognitive, psychosocial, brain-related). These
'experimental' data will be compared between Fibromyalgia (FM) and healthy participants to
yield new understanding of the factors that govern treatment response. At the end of
experimental data collection, the investigators will collect data in the 'clinical' domain.
Hence, at the end of the experimental sessions, a subset of FM participants will receive a
mock drug (placebo disguised as an approved pain treatment) and another subset will provide
pain ratings only and hence serve as a waiting list control for the placebo trial. Data will
be studied in steps to understand factors that mediate treatment outcomes and finally the
investigators will use advanced computational tools used for big data analysis and aim to
identify factors that can be used as biomarkers and precision medicine tools.