Stratified medical and technological approaches to managing chronic orofacial pain patients (V1)

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  Stratified medicine and technological approaches to aid diagnosis and management of chronic orofacial pain patients.

• IRAS ID

  173208

• Contact name

  Tara Renton

• Contact email

  tara.renton@kcl.ac.uk

• Sponsor organisation

  King's College London

• Duration of Study in the UK

  5 years, 0 months, 0 days

• Research summary

  Chronic orofacial pain (COFP) is prevalent, providing many significant challenges in patient management. These include:
  - Diagnostic challenges due to complex anatomical area;
  - Poor training of various medical and surgical specialties with siloes of interest in these conditions;
  - Poor patient compliance with treatments, resulting in patients seeing many clinicians offering varied diagnoses and inappropriate treatments, causing poor outcomes.

  A key priority for the Medical Research Council is to improve the care for chronic orofacial pain (COFP) patients. Application of a stratified medicine approach has proven successful in patients with jaw-joint pain and chronic back pain. However, there are no published studies to date, on the genetic and other metabolic strategies applied to COFP patients.

  This study will assess the following applications in diagnosing and managing COFP patients;
  • Stratified medicine (assessing demographic, biological and psychological factors that predict outcome of treatment interventions)
  • Technological developments (use of online questionnaires and education, artificial intelligence diagnostics and smartphone applications)

  The proposed methodologies will be the ‘first-of-its-kind’ to support patients with COFP (400-600 patients per year). KHP BioResource and multidisciplinary clinicians involved in the COFP service at KHP will play important roles in this innovative pilot stratification approach.

  Pilot data collected in this study will allow the sensitivity and specificity of the ANN to be analysed, which upon necessary amendments, will then be tested among a larger cohort of patients (up to 3,000 patients over 5 years). The data collected from the pilot study will also form the basis of future MRC grant applications, with possible translation to other chronic pain conditions.

• REC name

  London - Dulwich Research Ethics Committee

• REC reference

  15/LO/1108

• Date of REC Opinion

  26 Aug 2015

• REC opinion

  Further Information Favourable Opinion