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Published May 14, 2026
By Darlene Muguiro
¶¶Òõ¶ÌÊÓƵ College of Health Sciences

Dr. Priyanka Rana, assistant professor of Physical Therapy and Movement Sciences, was recently selected for a highly competitive $50,000 clinical/translational research grant from the U.S. Association for the Study of Pain. Rana, together with co-PI Dr. Shashwati Geed, assistant professor of Physical Therapy and Movement Sciences, will investigate the temporal patterns of pain inhibitory mechanisms in patients with chronic pain using an electroencephalogram (EEG). They hope to elucidate whether this population experiences not only reduced pain inhibition but also delayed activation of inhibitory mechanisms of pain. Ultimately, the study results can inform the development of biomarkers for pain chronification risk and guide precisely timed therapeutic interventions for individuals with chronic pain.

The study is an extension of Rana’s dissertation work, which revealed that the nervous system can be trained to improve pain sensitivity using CPM (conditioned pain modulation), a phenomenon where the perception of pain is reduced in the presence of a second painful stimulus.

“I knew through my previous work about the peripheral and central nervous system function, but I didn’t know what was happening in the motor cortex. So, Dr. Geed, a neurophysiology expert studying brain activities, and I got together to collaborate on a grant last year and were successful,” she said. “The Department of Physical Therapy is very conducive to faculty collaboration, so we happened to be speaking in the hallway one day about how pain is perceived and modulated by the brain networks, and we bounced the idea off to Dr. Gurovich, who told us to go for it. I wrote a new grant, and we were funded.”

The new study will use EEG to study brain oscillations and determine how quickly the body’s natural pain inhibitory system activates after receiving a painful stimulus; they will compare times between a control group of 30 healthy individuals and a group of 30 individuals with chronic pain. Their hypothesis is that individuals with chronic pain do have difficulties with activation of this inhibitory system. The research is novel in the sense that it is looking at whether or not the timing system within chronic pain patients is dysfunctional – with millisecond level data gathered from the EEG.

“A lot of the current pain research assesses pain peripherally as in, ‘How much pain do you feel on a scale of 1-10 right now?’” Geed explained. “But the brain receives this painful stimulus, then regulates how much pain a person actually experiences, which depends on how active or inhibited the brain circuits that regulate this pain perception are. We’re excited because few research labs are asking these kinds of questions about the timing of activation of the pain-modulation circuitry.”

The results of the study will be used to establish a baseline – how quickly do these pain inhibition circuits activate, in healthy and in those with long-term pain. The team’s next question, which depends on data from this study, will be whether brain circuitry in chronic pain patients can be modulated using non-invasive brain stimulation techniques to shut down what they call the “five-alarm fire” system in these patients’ bodies that seems to (hypothetically) be activated without a real fire. Better understanding these pain pathways can help efforts to treat chronic pain noninvasively and without drugs in the future. Compared to traditional drug therapies, the non-invasive interventions would be localized and less prone to reward-seeking addiction type behaviors.

“As healthcare professionals, we are always looking for improvement of our patients’ condition, so while the waiting period for the approval of the intervention may be long, we want to be sure it is safe and effective,” Rana said.

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