The study Sensing the body matters: Profiles of interoceptive sensibility in chronic pain adjustment was awarded the 2022 Grünenthal Pain Award last October 20, as part of the 8th 'Integrate to Care' Congress of APED - Associação Portuguesa para o Estudo da Dor (Portuguese Association for the Study of Pain), which took place at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto.
Photo from Linkedin page Fórum Hospital do Futuro
The Grünenthal Pain Award is an annual prize created by the Grünenthal Foundation to honor works in Portuguese or English by health professionals on basic or clinical research topics related to pain. Inês Oliveira won the clinical research prize.
The awarded paper was recently published in the scientific journal PAIN. In this research, Inês Oliveira, Margarida Garrido, Helena Carvalho, and Sónia Bernardes identified skill profiles of Interoceptive Sensitivity - the self-reported experience of the ability to feel, interpret and self-regulate internal sensations - in individuals with chronic musculoskeletal pain. Furthermore, the study provides evidence for the role of interoceptive sensitivity in the adjustment to chronic pain, particularly at the level of psychological and behavioral processes that are protective and/or of risk for pain persistence. The data from this study allow for refining theoretical pain models by explaining body-mind interactions, and contributing to the development of personalized interventions, improving the adjustment to chronic pain.
This is the second time this research work has received an award. Back in June, it was awarded the Garcia de Orta 2023 Prize. Inês Oliveira, a psychomotor trainer at the Psychiatry Department and in collaboration with the Pain Unit of Garcia de Orta Hospital, developed this study as part of her doctoral project funded by FCT (Ref. 2020.05586.BD), carried out at CIS-Iscte.