Kristin Schreiber
Stanford University, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Surgery is supposed to end with recovery, but for roughly one in four patients the pain at the surgical site is still there a year later. That persistent post-surgical pain brings disability and mental suffering, and it keeps people on opioid painkillers long enough to risk addiction.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Neuroscience
Psychology
- Topics
persistent post-surgical pain
preventive analgesia
pain amplification
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- 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.
- Determine how the pain amplification phenotype relates to the surgical inflammatory response, measuring pro-inflammatory and pro-resolving mediators in patients followed longitudinally before, during and after surgery.
- Characterize psychophysical amplification such as temporal summation of pain, alongside psychosocial factors including stress, sleep disruption, anxiety and catastrophizing, to quantify how much each contributes to variation in postoperative pain trajectories.
- Test whether preventive analgesic strategies differ in effectiveness across diverse patient samples undergoing a variety of surgeries, to establish how broadly risk-targeted prevention can be applied.
More about the research
More than 230 million operations happen worldwide each year, so even a modest fraction is a large number of people. Laboratory science has mapped many ways acute pain can become chronic, yet almost none of it has translated into preventing the problem in actual patients. This program builds a human model of that acute-to-chronic transition by studying patients before, during and after a range of surgeries, and uses it to find who is at risk and what might protect them.
Why it matters
If preoperative screening can flag the 20–30% of surgical patients most likely to develop persistent post-surgical pain, targeted non-opioid prevention could spare them long-term pain and disability and shorten their exposure to opioids, reducing addiction risk. Linking the pain amplification phenotype to inflammatory and pro-resolving signals may also reveal which biological pathways preventive treatments should address.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jennifer Waljee
Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis, IN·Public Health & Epidemiology
Measure how state opioid prescribing limits affect opioid prescribing and adverse events after surgery, and how effects vary by policy feature, patient, procedure and prescriber, using commercial, Medicare and Medicaid claims with quasi-experimental methods.
Frank Symons
University of Minnesota, MN·Medicine & Clinical Research
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.
Chad Brummett
University of Michigan, MI·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether cannabidiol (CBD, as the FDA-approved drug Epidiolex) taken around surgery reduces opioid use in the 4 weeks after total knee arthroplasty, in a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of 380 patients.
The school
Stanford University: 87 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 739 research doctorates a year.
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