Early Life Pain
Pain impacts us all regardless of our ethnicity, our sex or our age. Whilst chronic pain states are often thought of as being something we see in older people pain also significantly impacts people in the neonatal period, childhood and adolescence.
Pain in early life may arise through a birth defect, surgery or disease. Babies born prematurely are often placed in hospital environments that require painful procedures to be undertaken to obtain blood etc. Babies and children undergo lifesaving or life altering surgery. Finally children themselves suffer from painful diseases like Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis, functional disorders of the GI tract, sickle cell disease and cancer (to list but a few).
In addition to the immediate effects of pain on the younger individual we know that pain in early life shapes the way we experience pain as adults and predisposes us to develop chronic pain states in later life as well.
When we are born the parts of the peripheral and central nervous systems which detect and process pain are immature. This means that pain responses in babies and children are different to adults. As we grow and experience short lived pain as an ordinary part of our day to day lives we “learn” how to process pain appropriately. However if we encounter significant pain in these critical periods of our development it alters the developmental pathway our nervous systems take and alters how they work in adulthood.
We study the way in which pain in early life alters pain responses in early life and how this alters the way our nervous systems mature. We use a range of approaches to study childhood cancer pain and the in-built pain control systems we utilise from day-to-day including multi-electrode array electrophysiology, cell biology, transcriptomics, microfluidic systems, whole animal behaviour and neuroimaging, working in close collaboration with clinical scientists, oncologists, cancer biologists and neuroimagers to understand how pain can be controlled better in children to relieve their pain now and in the future.
To find out more, please contact Dr Gareth Hathway