Surgeon wins new funding for arthritis pain research
An Oxford trainee surgeon has been awarded a prestigious new fellowship from a medical research charity to find out more about understanding pain in hip arthritis using brain imaging.
Stephen Gwilym, who is based at the Nuffield Department of Orthopaedic Surgery (NDOS) in Windmill Road, Headington, has been awarded a £201,460 Orthopaedic Clinical Research Fellowship over three years by the Arthritis Research Campaign.
Mr Gwilym, who will continue to work part-time as a surgeon, will be investigating why some people with arthritis have more pain than others and are therefore more likely to need joint replacement surgery. He will be using a new type of brain imaging to ‘see’ pain as it is felt by the patient.
Osteoarthritis, which affects more than two million older people in the UK and leads to joint pain and stiffness, is the main reason why more than 60,000 hip and 60,000 knee replacement operations are carried out every year.
“Pain is the main symptom of osteoarthritis, yet interestingly there is poor correlation between the degree of severity of osteoarthritis as shown on an x-ray and the amount of pain suffered by patients,” explained Mr Gwilym.
“Sometimes the x-ray changes are very mild and yet the pain is severe; while sometimes the x-ray changes can be severe and yet relatively little pain is felt by the patient.
However, more sophisticated imaging techniques mean that clinicians are now able to assess patients’ pain levels more accurately.
“We can now monitor how the brain responds to painful stimuli by using special brain scans called Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI), and in this study we aim to investigate the pain suffered by patients with osteoarthritis using this new type of imaging,” he added.
Mr Gwilym will collaborate with the Functional MRI of the Brain (FMRIB) centre in Oxford, which are world leaders in pain research using this modern imaging technique. “This is the first research of its type anywhere in the world and offers an opportunity to combine the expertise of the two research centres to investigate this common and important problem,” he added.
“If we can find out more about why some people with arthritis have more pain than others we hope to gain further insight into this common but complex clinical problem. It may also therefore be possible to predict which patients will benefit most from particular kinds of treatment including drugs and surgery.”
The Arthritis Research Campaign set up the orthopaedic fellowship scheme earlier this year in a bid to attract more orthopaedic surgeons into academic research. The aim is to further improve the outcomes of joint replacement surgery, and identify targets to develop exciting new drug treatments, to meet rising demand and public expectations.
