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Category: Project

Description: The Consortium Against Pain InEquality (CAPE) is a project funded by the Medical Research Council, bringing together people from a range of backgrounds – such as scientists, clinical researchers, and people with lived experience of chronic pain – to understand how adverse childhood experiences might lead to an increased vulnerability to chronic pain in adulthood. CAPE is part of the Advanced Pain Discovery Platform (APDP). Having a traumatic experience as a child – for example, abuse, neglect, violence, deprivation – can have a lifelong impact on a person’s life. About half of us may endure at least one such experience, but research has found that people who report having several adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, are more likely to have health problems later in life. CAPE’s aim is to improve our understanding of how ACEs might lead to chronic pain in adulthood. We will approach this from a variety of angles, piecing together different types of evidence. These different approaches are summarised in 5 related work packages. Work package 2 will use epidemiological methods to analyse the relationship between ACEs and chronic pain. Epidemiological methods involve looking at information from large numbers of people in a population, and recording what happens to them, often by asking them to fill out questionnaires. We want to look at ACEs and pain, considering other factors (such as mental health or support from friends or family) which may contribute to pain vulnerability. We will also try to find out if a relationship is specific to pain or is related to poor health more generally. The main aim of Work package 2 is to find and analyse data that other universities and institutions have already collected, but that haven’t yet been used to try to answer questions about ACEs and pain. To do this, we will: 1. search for large population-based cohort studies that have suitable data for our aim 2. set up safe access to these data and numerically analyse them 3. decide whether some studies would be improved with freshly collected information from the people in their cohorts, and contact the investigators to arrange this, where possible.