Our central hypothesis in the Michigan MAPP Discovery Site is that a subset of women with IC/PBS have a """"""""central"""""""" neurobiological problem in pain or sensory processing, as occurs in fibromyalgia (FM), rather than a disorder confined to the bladder. Project 2, Pain and Sensory Processing in IC/PBS and Fibromyalgia, will be co-led by Drs. David Williams and Richard Gracely. This study will perform experimental sensory testing and functional neuroimaging in women with IC/PBS, and compare these results to matched a) healthy female controls, and b) female FM patients. We hypothesize that these studies will show that IC/PBS patients are diffusely sensitive to pain and other sensory stimuli, similar to FM patients, and different from controls.
The specific aims of this study are: 1) Tp characterize IC/PBS patients regarding the presence of signs and symptoms of FM, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), and related conditions, and verify a high rate of co-morbid syndromes, 2) To show that individuals with IC/PBS are tender throughout their body, similar to fibromyalgia patients, and different from controls, 3) To show that IC/PBS patients, like FM patients, are also more sensitive to the loudness of auditory tones, even when these are presented in a manner that minimizes or eliminates response bias, and 4) To demonstrate that this """"""""leftshift"""""""" in stimulus response function in IC/PBS is not only identified using self-report measures, but also present when functional MRI (fMRI) is used to assess the augmented neuronal response to painful pressure stimuli and auditory tones. Establishing that 1C patients display augmented central pain and sensory processing, like other conditions such as FM and IBS, will greatly advance this field, by making useful a variety of functional neuroimaging and other research methods that can be used to study central neurobiological mechanisms in these chronic pelvic pain syndromes. Similarly, showing similarities amongst these disorders would logically lead to testing therapies in IC/PBS patients that are found to be efficacious in fibromyalgia and related conditions.
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