Dayna Averitt
Texas Woman's University, TX·Neuroscience
About a quarter of people live with pain in the mouth, jaw, or face, including headache, migraine, and pain from temporomandibular joint disorders affecting the jaw joint. These conditions are three to four times more common in women, who also tend to report more severe pain and more overlapping pain conditions, yet women remain underrepresented in pain research.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Pharmacology
Physiology
- Topics
orofacial pain
craniofacial pain
temporomandibular joint disorder
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Test the hypothesis that estrogen enhances serotonin-driven immune-to-neuron signaling at trigeminal sensory neurons, using a rat unilateral anterior crossbite model of temporomandibular joint pain combined with pain behavior testing.
- Determine which estrogen receptors mediate these effects by comparing signaling through estrogen receptor alpha, estrogen receptor beta, and GPER (a cell-surface estrogen receptor) with pharmacological tools in trigeminal ganglion tissue and cultures.
- Define how 17β-estradiol alters release of serotonin and other inflammatory mediators from trigeminal ganglion macrophages, the resident immune cells sitting beside facial sensory neuron cell bodies, using cell culture assays.
- Map estrogen-driven changes in gene expression and neuroanatomy within the trigeminal ganglion by transcriptome profiling and neuroanatomical labeling, linking molecular changes to the development of orofacial pain behaviors.
More about the research
Both clinical and animal studies point to estrogen as a modulator of this pain, but how estrogen acts on the sensory neurons that carry facial pain signals has not been resolved. The work here investigates that mechanism in the trigeminal system, the nerve network that relays sensation from the face and jaw.
Why it matters
Temporomandibular joint disorders, migraine, and other craniofacial pain conditions disproportionately burden women, and current treatments do not address why. Identifying how estrogen and serotonin together sensitize facial sensory neurons, and which estrogen receptor is responsible, could point to drug targets for jaw and face pain that account for hormonal status, a factor largely missing from existing pain therapies.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Brendan Dougherty
University of Minnesota, MN·Neuroscience
Test whether spinal estrogen receptor signaling is necessary for respiratory neuroplasticity in female and male rats, using nerve recordings of breathing output with estrogen receptor drugs and siRNA gene knockdown.
Aditi Bhattacharya
New York University, NY·Neuroscience
Measure FN1 and its disease-specific variant Fn EDA in oral cancer tissue from patients, using multiplex immunohistochemistry (staining several proteins at once), and test whether their levels track with clinical pain scores and metastasis.
Krishnan Dhandapani
Augusta University, GA·Neuroscience
Test whether reducing or inhibiting aromatase, the brain enzyme that makes 17β-estradiol locally, worsens cognitive decline, and whether pulsed photobiomodulation or estradiol prevents both the enzyme's decline and memory deficits in a rat model of Alzheimer's disease.
The school
Texas Woman's University: 3 labs on PI Pages, $9M a year on research, 238 research doctorates a year.
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