At the ABN 2024 conference, ACNR Publisher Rachael Hansford spoke to a variety of delegates to get their views on current topics in neurology. In this interview, Irene Tracey talks about her plenary on chronic pain.
Professor Irene Tracey
I’m Vice Chancellor of the University of Oxford, UK. I’ve been in that place for the past 18 months. Prior to that I was head of clinical neurosciences in Oxford. I’ve been a neuroscientist working in neuroimaging for about 30 years of my career, trying to understand both how the normal experience of acute pain is produced by human brain activity, but more importantly, for patients who suffer chronic pain, how we can use these imaging tools to better understand the mechanisms that go wrong, and hold people in these chronic pain states and make it much worse.
I often describe the work which I was describing today in the plenary, about working in the gap between injury perception, and the fact that it’s a very nonlinear relationship between the injury and perception. And we’ve worked on different ways of using imaging to understand and explain how that non linearity is produced, coming up with new mechanisms for new targets that hopefully then will alleviate chronic pain patients.
Rachael Hansford
Is this the first time you’ve spoken at an ABN meeting?
Professor Irene Tracey
Yes, they’ve been trying to get me here for a few years to come and do this plenary, and just with one thing and another, it’s not been possible. So I’m delighted to finally make it today. I’m just coming in and out for the day, but it’s really great to be here. And of course, I know lots of colleagues having run a department that had a lot of neurologists in as well as anaesthetists, ophthalmologists, and neuroscientists. So, many people I know, beyond Oxford, and I’ve always heard about what a wonderful meeting it is, and how much people enjoy being here, and the knowledge they gain, and so it’s a real thrill to finally get here and see it for myself. I hear it was record attendance. So congratulations to the organisers and certainly I was really pleased to see how interested people were to hear about pain.
