Frank Symons
University of Minnesota, MN·Medicine & Clinical Research
Many people with cerebral palsy (CP) live with chronic pain. CP is the most common cause of lifelong movement and developmental disability that begins in childhood.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Neuroscience
Psychology
- Topics
cerebral palsy
chronic pain
pain assessment
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Feb 2027
What they work on
- Compare sensory function in children and adolescents with cerebral palsy with and without chronic pain, using a modified quantitative sensory testing (QST) protocol that measures both large- and small-fiber nerve function.
- Relate QST measures in a large sample of young people with CP to individual and clinical characteristics and health outcomes, to identify tailoring variables that could guide pain treatment.
- Measure pain- and inflammation-related biomarkers within the standardized QST protocol in children and adolescents with cerebral palsy.
- Explore whether patients with CP can be grouped into sensory subtypes based on loss or gain of sensory function, drawing on concepts from neuropathic pain research.
More about the research
Pain is hard to study in people who also have intellectual, motor or communication impairments, and advances from pain research rarely reach them. Little is known about how the body's sense of touch and pain works in CP, or why some people develop chronic pain and others do not.
Why it matters
Chronic pain affects people with cerebral palsy disproportionately, yet clinicians lack guidelines for choosing pain treatment targets. Identifying sensory patterns linked to chronic pain could support a more integrated way to assess pain in CP and other severe intellectual and developmental disabilities. Over time, this could improve treatment decisions for these patients.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Cristina Sarmiento
University of Colorado Denver/Anschutz Medical Campus, CO·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Explore with qualitative methods what primary care providers need from CPC2U, an online health tool for adults with cerebral palsy, and what affects its use in practice.
Kristin Schreiber
Stanford University, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Screen surgical patients before operation with scalable bedside quantitative sensory tests and brief psychosocial questionnaires to identify a high-risk pain amplification phenotype, then test whether targeted non-opioid preventive treatments reduce persistent post-surgical pain and opioid use.
Jeffrey D Milbrandt
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Neuroscience
Determine how regulatory ubiquitin tags, including those added by Parkin after mitochondrial damage, change the activity of SARM1, the NAD+-destroying enzyme that executes axon degeneration.
The school
University of Minnesota: 88 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 722 research doctorates a year.
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