Chronic Pain in Traumatic Brain Injury

Sixty-eight adult participants were enrolled in this study. Of them, thirty-one were healthy controls (HC, N = 31), and thirty-seven had closed-head TBI (TBI, N = 37). Participants with TBI were categorized into those with chronic pain (TBI-P, N = 19) and those without pain (TBI-NP, N = 18). Demographic and injury characteristics for all participants are shown in Table 1. In addition, all participants were: (1) fluent in English, (2) free from significant cognitive impairment using the MMSE-2 (PAR, 2020 ), (3) with no recent history of alcohol or drug abuse, (4) with no severe major depression, and (5) free from other neurological diseases (e.g., multiple sclerosis) or trauma (e.g., spinal cord injury). Enrolled TBI participants had experienced their injury six to two hundred seventy-six months before the start of the study and were thus considered to be in the chronic time period following injury (Mayer et al., 2017 (link)). The severity of TBI in each participant was determined based on the Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) score when available. Participants were recruited through advertisements posted at the University of Miami Medical Campus and the Health and Human Services/National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (HHS/NIDILRR) organization, South Florida TBI Model System center, the Transforming Research and Clinical Knowledge in Traumatic Brain Injury (TRACK-TBI) study center within the University of Miami (UM), and by word of mouth. TBI participants provided medical records with proof of head/brain injury obtained from their medical care provider or insurance company unless they were directly referred from the HHS/NIDILRR, South Florida TBI Model System center, or the TRACK-TBI study center. The institutional review board of the University of Miami approved the study protocol, and all participants signed an informed consent form before participation. The data presented in this article is a subset of a more extensive study involving pain, quantitative sensory and psychological/psychosocial evaluations, and brain imaging in individuals with TBI. Pain, quantitative sensory, and psychological/psychosocial data of this larger cohort have been published (Robayo et al., 2022 (link)).