About this Research Topic
Musculoskeletal pain is a significant public health problem associated with numerous physical and psychological conditions and socioeconomic consequences. Effective pain management is a priority for reducing the impact on individuals and society. However, pain is a complex and multifactorial experience driven by different underlying processes that can vary significantly between individuals leading to different treatment needs. Stratified medicine is an approach to identifying and characterizing patients’ subgroups/phenotypes with similar underlying mechanisms whose individual treatment needs can be further tailored via personalized medicine. It is a multidisciplinary process that can consider various pain modalities, intensity, duration, pattern, location, and quality of pain, as well as patient characteristics such as lifestyle, occupation, presence of associated symptoms/multimorbidity, response to treatment, and treatment interactions. A spectrum of tools is used for this purpose. These tools range from advanced computational approaches via specific biomarkers, genetic, molecular, and imaging, to psychosocial determinants to finally predict an individual's response to different treatments. Overall, pain phenotypes can help identify patients more likely to benefit from specific treatments and avoid treatments unlikely to be effective or cause harm.
This Research Topic aims to bring together a collection of manuscripts that deal with identifying or validating musculoskeletal pain phenotypes or discuss the current state and future of personalized pain medicine. The research topic will advance stratified and personalized medicine across musculoskeletal conditions, optimal delivery of existing pain treatments, and identify patients who require novel treatments.
We welcome the submission of clinical and translational science manuscripts including the following topics:
• Different approaches to defining musculoskeletal pain phenotypes, including but not limited to computational, genetic, molecular, imaging, psychosocial, and clinical approaches.
• Comparison of different approaches and their performance in identifying pain phenotypes.
• Comparison of pain phenotypes to endotypes and potential clinical decisions affected by these different inferences.
• Validation of the previously defined phenotypes or translation to another musculoskeletal condition or patient group.
• Clinical implications, barriers, and costs of stratified and personalized medicine in musculoskeletal pain.
There are no restrictions on study design or article type; however, original investigations employing advanced (repeated) statistical modeling or machine learning algorithms, especially comparisons between these, will be prioritized.
This Research Topic aims to bring together a collection of manuscripts that deal with identifying or validating musculoskeletal pain phenotypes or discuss the current state and future of personalized pain medicine. The research topic will advance stratified and personalized medicine across musculoskeletal conditions, optimal delivery of existing pain treatments, and identify patients who require novel treatments.
We welcome the submission of clinical and translational science manuscripts including the following topics:
• Different approaches to defining musculoskeletal pain phenotypes, including but not limited to computational, genetic, molecular, imaging, psychosocial, and clinical approaches.
• Comparison of different approaches and their performance in identifying pain phenotypes.
• Comparison of pain phenotypes to endotypes and potential clinical decisions affected by these different inferences.
• Validation of the previously defined phenotypes or translation to another musculoskeletal condition or patient group.
• Clinical implications, barriers, and costs of stratified and personalized medicine in musculoskeletal pain.
There are no restrictions on study design or article type; however, original investigations employing advanced (repeated) statistical modeling or machine learning algorithms, especially comparisons between these, will be prioritized.
Keywords: musculoskeletal pain, personalized medicine, cluster, phenotype, and endotype
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
