Acute pain is a signal indicating actual or potential tissue damage and is crucial to survival. However, chronic pain, or pain that persists long after tissue has healed, is a terrible experience, and doesn’t seem to serve the same useful function. So trying to figure out its mechanisms, while testing ways to predict and prevent it is pretty important, and this has been the center of my research.

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I approach it through studying brain structure and function and comparing people with and without chronic pain. I and my colleagues in the Pain and Passions Lab at Northwestern University (Chicago, IL) have found that oscillatory activity and the normally synchronous behavior of brain networks involving reward circuitry and the prefrontal cortex is massively altered in chronic pain. We have also observed over time that the brain shifts pain processing from sensory-related to emotion-related brain areas as pain becomes chronic. These findings have led to interventional studies in which we use traits of reward circuitry and prefrontal cortex to predict whether people with new pain will respond to placebos and active drugs and get better, or transition into chronic pain.

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 Mansour, Ali, Alex T. Baria, Pascal Tetreault, Etienne Vachon-Presseau, Pei-Ching Chang, Lejian Huang, A. Vania Apkarian, and Marwan N. Baliki. "Global disruption of degree rank order: a hallmark of chronic pain." Scientific reports 6, no. 1 (2016): 1-17.

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Baria, Alexis T. “The infrastructure of brain rhythms and its disruption in pain.” The brain adapting with pain. Ed. Apkarian AV. Philadelphia: Wolters Kluwer, 2015. Print.

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Berger, Sara E., Alexis T. Baria, Marwan N. Baliki, Ali Mansour, Kristi M. Herrmann, Souraya Torbey, Lejian Huang, Elle L. Parks, Thomas J. Schnizter, and A. Vania Apkarian. "Risky monetary behavior in chronic back pain is associated with altered modular connectivity of the nucleus accumbens." BMC research notes 7, no. 1 (2014): 1-14.

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Baliki, M. N., P. C. Chang, A. T. Baria, M. V. Centeno, and A. V. Apkarian. "Resting-state functional reorganization of the rat limbic system following neuropathic injury." Scientific reports 4, no. 1 (2014): 1-11.

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Baliki, Marwan N., Ali R. Mansour, Alex T. Baria, and A. Vania Apkarian. "Functional reorganization of the default mode network across chronic pain conditions." PloS one 9, no. 9 (2014): e106133.

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Baliki, Marwan N., Alex T. Baria, and A. Vania Apkarian. "The cortical rhythms of chronic back pain." Journal of Neuroscience 31, no. 39 (2011): 13981-13990.