NIH K01 Grant for Research on Disparities in Pain Treatment

Dr. Elizabeth Losin recently was awarded a K01 grant from the National Institutes of Health for a project titled "Psychological and Brain Mechanisms Underlying Disparities in Opioid and Non-Opioid Pain Treatment Decisions." The K01 grant is a prestigious award for early career scientists, intended to provide financial resources for an intensive mentored project. This grant will allow our lab to study the factors leading to opioid prescribing disparities across different groups. The project will involve the creation of a stimulus set specifically designed to be ecologically valid, and the later use of this stimulus set in an fMRI setting to determine which brain areas are associated with clinicians viewing others' pain and making prescription decisions. There are also plans to bring in clinicians to make face-to-face assessments of pain using standardized patient actors, so as to help determine how the study's findings can be applied to clinical settings in order to reduce the negative impacts of pain stereotypes. All in all, our lab is very excited to begin work on this important project!