Chronic pain: Searching for answers in the brain

Excellence participant Laura Sirucek investigates how the brain adapts to pain, with the goal of improving treatments for chronic pain.

What actually happens in the brain when people experience pain? Excellence participant Laura Sirucek is seeking answers to this question.

"Our brain is very malleable or 'plastic'. When we learn new things, the nerve cells form new connections and strengthen the pathways involved. These plastic changes – called neuroplasticity – also occur when we have pain. The ultimate goal is to learn more about the brain's neuroplasticity in chronic pain, because this knowledge can help develop better treatment options for patients," says Laura Sirucek. 

Knowledge about brain neuroplasticity in healthy individuals and people with chronic pain can be used to identify brain areas that exhibit pathological neuroplasticity in people with chronic pain. This mapping is important because while the brain's ability to adapt to illness and injury is a crucial physiological mechanism, it can also go wrong and interfere with recovery. Brain neuroplasticity could be one of the reasons why pain sometimes persist long after an injury has healed.

From fascination to research
It was the complexity of pain research and its importance to society that initially piqued her interest. Worldwide, one in five people suffers from chronic pain and effective treatment remains difficult, making chronic pain one of the leading causes of disability and reduced quality of life. This is partly because pain is not only affected by how many nerve fibers are activated; it is also shaped by past experiences, our mood, and many other factors. It is precisely this complexity that makes the field both challenging and interesting because there is still a lot to explore. 

"I fell in love with neuroscience when I started to understand how a nerve fiber works. Imagining what processes are going on in our body and brain while we talk, listen, walk or do several things at once is completely fascinating. My interest grew further when I saw a signal from a human brain for the first time, witnessing that we can actually measure the brain's reaction to what is happening in the body," says Laura Sirucek.  

Collaboration pushes the boundaries
As a researcher, Laura Sirucek is motivated by the overarching purpose of her research: to create new knowledge that matters. She finds it particularly rewarding to investigate something that no one else has found an answer to before and thus push the boundaries of what we know.

For her, the variety of her research tasks is fulfilling, ranging from experiments and reflections to the design of new studies and the dissemination of the results through presentations or visual figures. Just as importantly, she values collaboration with colleagues and enjoys the moments when the research team gathers, discusses new findings, and tries to better understand the complexity of the brain.

Vision strengthens research
In addition to her current experience/employment/postdoctoral fellowship at AAU, Laura Sirucek has had two shorter research stays at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver and Radboud University in Nijmegen. The stay at UBC strengthened her ambition to pursue an academic career because she was inspired by the international environment where you work towards common goals. At Radboud University, she learned the importance of strong collaborations with experts in methodology. Her time at AAU has been even more influential.

"It's hard to put into words how important my time at AAU has been. I honestly underestimated how much your research network can grow through international mobility. Professional connections do not double with a change of institution, they grow exponentially. The same applies to one's knowledge. At AAU, I am surrounded by talented people who work with other methods and in areas other than my own, and I constantly benefit from this knowledge through joint projects, seminars, programs such as AAU Excellence and informal conversations."

A clear vision for the future of pain treatment
In the coming years, Laura Sirucek aims to further develop her research direction and build her own research group focused on improving the treatment of chronic pain by better understanding involved mechanisms.

"I want to foster a healthy, supportive and inclusive research environment and do my best to share my passion for pain research with others. I believe that we do our best when we work on something we are really passionate about," says Laura Sirucek.