Discovery may contribute to better pain management
A study with the participation of CINTESIS/Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto (FMUP) has identified nine pain biomarkers through blood tests.
The discovery, reported by Agência LUSA, may allow for better pain management, particularly in people with dementia and who are receiving palliative or end-of-life care, but who are unable to communicate. The difficulties in identifying and characterizing pain in these cases are a challenge, hindering the therapeutic approach.
“The results achieved allow an individualized and much more efficient approach than has been done until today, in which we depend on the patient’s self-report to be able to introduce the necessary therapies to control pain,” said Hugo Ribeiro, professor at FMUP and first author of the study, in statements to the agency.
According to the scientific article entitled “Monocytes in the Characterization of Pain in Palliative Patients with Severe Dementia — A Pilot Study”, published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences,53 patients with dementia were analyzed.
The aim was to understand whether a set of monocytes and proteins could serve as non-invasive peripheral biomarkers for identifying and characterizing pain in patients with severe dementia.
The researchers concluded that indeed the percentage of monocytes, and particularly the levels of CD11c, CD163, and CD206, can be used to identify the presence of pain and the type of pain in these patients.
This will be the largest known study on pain biomarkers to date and the only one to compare patients with non-cancer pain using specific monocytes as biomarkers.
“When we have dependent and vulnerable patients who are unable to self-report symptoms, being able to identify pain biomarkers, namely those presented in this study, will contribute to faster and more appropriate pain control, as well as to the reduction of associated suffering”, they conclude.
Other participants in this study were José Paulo Andrade, a researcher at CINTESIS and professor at FMUP, Marília Dourado, Ana Bela Sarmento Ribeiro, Manuel Teixeira Veríssimo, Ana Cristina Gonçalves, Joana Jorge and Raquel Alves, from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Coimbra.
