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Council

Ursula Wesselmann, MD, PhD, DTM&H

Councilor

Institution/Organization

Professor of Anesthesiology & Perioperative Medicine, Professor of Neurology, Professor of Psychology; William A. Lell, M.D. – Paul N. Samuelson, M.D. Endowed Professorship, The University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL, USA

Member Since

1993

Term End Date

2028

Committees

  • Founding Member of the IASP Special Interest Group (SIG) on Pain of Urogenital Origin, now known as the SIG on Abdominal and Pelvic Pain (1998)
  • Member of the IASP SIG on Pain of Urogenital Origin Taxonomy Group, which developed the 2012 IASP Visceral Pain Taxonomy (2004-2012)
  • Chair of the SIG on Pain of Urogenital Origin (2005-2008)
  • Associate Editor - Clinical Sciences Section, PAIN (2005-2009)
  • IASP Committee on Research (2006-2009)
  • Member of the “Global Year Against Pain in Women” IASP Task Force (2007-2008)
  • Member of the “Global Year against Visceral Pain” IASP Task Force (2012-2013)
  • Consultant for the IASP Taskforce for the Classification of Chronic Pain – Committee on Visceral Pain Syndromes (2018-2020)
  • IASP Developing Countries Working Group (2018-present)

Country

United States

Disclosures

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I am trained as a neurologist and neuroscientist. For over 30 years my work as a clinician-scientist has focused on chronic pain, especially on chronic pelvic and urogenital pain conditions and chronic pain syndromes in women. These areas are typically under-recognized and considered taboo. Patients are often stigmatized. My translational (‘from bench to bedside and reverse’) research program has ranged from preclinical studies, to human studies and to clinical trials. The long-term goal of my research program is to (1) identify pathophysiological mechanisms contributing to the development and persistence of chronic pain syndromes that will allow to define important new targets for therapy and intervention to reduce and eliminate chronic pain conditions and to (2) identify standardized methods that will allow clinicians and researchers to identify patients at-risk to develop chronic pain and to target those patients for early and tailored interventions.

The research studies on the pathophysiological mechanisms of chronic visceral pain from my lab in collaboration with many collaborators on the national and international level have contributed to a shift in medical practice in the fields of gynecology, urology and gastroenterology, which previously had focused mainly on surgical interventions with the aim to remove the tissue or organ that was considered to be the reason for the pain complaint. As a result, multi-disciplinary approaches based on bio-psycho-social pain mechanisms have been explored to treat patients with visceral pain, similar to other chronic pain syndromes.

I have been fortunate to work with many other clinicians and scientists in the last 15 years in a concerted effort at the national and global level to advance policies based on the knowledge gained in basic science and clinical pain research and to bring the research findings into the clinic as well as to apply them to clinical trial design to advance pain management.

 

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