VCU receives $1.1 million research grant from NIH

By Michael Ford
University News Services

RICHMOND, Va. – A Virginia Commonwealth University researcher has received a $1.1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop a new approach to insure proper use of pain medications in patients with a history of prescription drug abuse.

As the project’s principal investigator, Deborah L. Haller, Ph.D., associate chairman of the Division of Addiction Medicine will develop the medication adherence therapy. The new program combines patient education and self-monitoring, motivational counseling and behavioral therapy. The grant also will support an evaluation effort to determine if this new therapy insures effective pain relief and reduces abuse.

"Pain is the most common symptom, the number one reason people go to see the doctor. And generally, doctors are poorly trained to deal with pain," said Haller, associate professor, psychiatry and a faculty member in VCU’s Institute for Drug and Alcohol Studies . "The goal of the study is to design a brief treatment that doctors and nurses can use in primary-care settings or in pain clinics when they have patients who have a history of addiction, or who seem to be abusing their pain medicine."

Statistics show as many as one in five patients with chronic pain abuse their pain medications. Other patients with chronic pain do not receive adequate analgesic medications because their physicians are concerned that patients may become addicted. This is particularly true for patients who previously have abused pain medications.

Funding for the four-year therapy development project comes from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. During the first two years, investigators will focus on testing and refining the new treatment with only a handful of patients. During the final two years, a pilot study of 30 participants will test the therapy. Haller said that strong results would likely lead to a large clinical trial involving several hundred patients.

"The people who tend to have problems with pain medicine are people who have previously had problems with alcohol or other drugs," Haller said. "It’s much less likely that someone who’s never had any kind of problem with any kind of drug is going to get hooked on pain medicine."

Three other VCU faculty are study co-investigators: Sydney H. Schnoll, M.D., Ph.D., professor and chairman of VCU’s Division of Addiction Medicine, an expert on chronic pain; Karen Ingersoll, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychiatry, who also has grant funding to study medication adherence among HIV patients; and Dace S. Svikis Pickens, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology, whose expertise is cognitive behavioral therapy.