Smith Blog

Dr. Moldwin was an invited panelist for the National Institute’s of Health’s (NIH) Office of Research on Women’s Health (ORWH) held March 4-6th, 2009. The meeting was entitled “Moving into the Future: New Dimensions and Strategies for Women’s Health Research.” It was designed to help the NIH formulate its research priorities for the next 10-20 years. The meeting covered all areas of women’s health. Dr. Moldwin was present to plead for more dollars for research projects that would help interstitial cystitis patients. Also present representing the interests of IC patients was Barbara Gordon, the Executive Director of the ICA.

Some suggestions that came from the “Chronic Pain Syndromes” panel that Dr. Moldwin attended included:

1. Developing research strategies to investigate chronic pain syndromes as a “systemic” problem (that has manifestations in multiple systems in the body). This may help better establish why so many patients with IC also have problems like fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, migraine headaches, Sjögren’s Syndrome, vulvodynia, chronic fatigue syndrome, etc. This topic received the most attention and discussion.
2. Developing better ways to conduct trials for new therapies.
3. Developing better animal models for chronic pain syndromes. We had a very long discussion about this very complex topic.
4. Exploring issues related to clinician- patient interactions in the chronic pain patient. Differences in how people describe their difficulties which may vary on the basis of previous experiences, social environment, or sex.
5. The effect that factors such as hormones and diet may have on these pain syndromes.
6. The great need for the development of a database system where clinical data from patients can be pooled together from multiple institutions.

Other topics that were discussed included:

1. The need for chronic pain syndromes (including IC) to be included in the curriculum of medical schools. Currently, medical students typically graduate without even hearing of fibromyalgia, IC, vulvodynia, etc… no less being taught to manage such patients. Without a basic understanding of these conditions from their basic training, how do we expect any of these bright people to treat or become researchers in this area? We suggested that the ORWH take a role in mandating discussion of these topics in medical school curricula.
2. Pharmaceutical companies apparently have lots of data on various medications which may show promise as future treatments for patients in pain. We would like to see some of these data voluntarily released, thereby giving researchers some groundwork for the development of future therapies.