Pain is invisible, but to people who experience it for months or even years, it can be a debilitating and life-altering reality. The Canadian Ontario Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) is now funding a pioneering research project to look into the brain’s role in chronic pain to improve prevention and treatment. The research will focus on what’s known as nonspecific, or nociplastic, chronic pain, in part by making the source of the pain more visible.
In January this year WSIB announced an historic $65.75M investment in St. Joseph’s Health Care London’s Lawson Research Institute, marking a transformative step forward in occupational injury and illness research. This 10-year commitment, the WSIB's largest-ever research investment, established Canada’s first Occupational Injury Prevention and Treatment Network (OIPTN), setting the stage for global leadership in addressing workplace health challenges. The new network integrates cutting-edge technology with cross-disciplinary collaboration to address chronic pain, mental health, and musculoskeletal (MSK) injuries—three key contributors to workplace injury claims.
It is hoped that the OIPTN commitment to fund the chronic pain research project led by Dr. Siobhan Schabrun will lead to a deeper understanding of what is happening in the brains of people affected by chronic nonspecific pain, what causes it and what we can do to prevent it.
“If you hurt your back and the injured tissue has healed after six to eight weeks, the pain should have gone away,” said Dr. Schabrun. “If the nerve continues to be pinched, you’ll have what we call neuropathic pain. But for some people the pain doesn’t go away, even though there are no pinched nerves and there’s nothing we can see, like a tumour. We call this chronic nonspecific pain because we can’t pinpoint a diagnosis.”
Dr. Aaron Thompson, chief medical officer at the WSIB, emphasized that chronic pain is not just pain that lasts a long time. “It is a unique diagnosis with unique pathophysiology and is often misdiagnosed as a psychological injury,” said Thompson. “There’s a reason people view it like that, but it’s a major disservice to the patient because it fails to recognize the pathophysiological basis of the persistent pain.”
Using Canada’s first positron emission tomography/magnetic resonance imagery (PET/MRI) scanner, which enables precise diagnosis of conditions like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, Dr. Schabrun will investigate brain markers that may predict who will develop chronic pain and who will recover. Her team is particularly interested in non-invasive brain stimulation as a possible prevention option.
With chronic nonspecific pain affecting many occupational injury sufferers, and escalating costs evident in many workers’ compensation schemes, the outcomes of this research will be reviewed closely by businesses, government, and most importantly individuals living with the burden of chronic pain.
Read more: WSIB funding research to change the way we see chronic pain - OHS Canada Magazine
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