Innovative book features UF contributors

Robert Yezierski, Ph.D., program director for the Comprehensive Center for Pain Research at the University of Florida, is co-editor of a new book, “Spinal Cord Injury Pain: Assessment, Mechanisms, Management,” the first comprehensive work to address both spinal cord injury and pain research.

The text reviews existing research and therapeutic strategies, and recommends directions for future research efforts. Contributors include Yezierski, and UF College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine faculty researchers Charles Vierck Jr., Ph.D., Richard Johnson, Ph.D., Paul Reier, Ph.D., and Douglas Anderson, Ph.D., along with former UF researcher Edward Wirth III, M.D., Ph.D.

The 440-page hardback summarizes presentations given last year at a symposium that drew experts from around the world in both spinal injury and pain research. Yezierski organized the symposium to conclude the efforts of a five-year task force he led for the International Association for the Study of Pain. The findings of the task force were reported at the symposium.

Paralysis associated with spinal cord injury has been widely studied, but secondary effects such as pain, bladder, and bowel dysfunction and spasticity have received much less attention. About one-third of spinal cord injured patients experience severe pain.

Yezierski, a professor of neuroscience and orthodontics in the UF College of Dentistry, has researched spinal cord injury pain since the early 1990s. While a member of the University of Miami’s neurological surgery faculty, he helped organize the pain program at The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis.

The Comprehensive Center for Pain Research, a joint effort by the College of Dentistry and the Evelyn F. and William L. McKnight Brain Institute of UF, is an umbrella organization with a primary goal to enhance UF’s excellence and diversity in pain research and management in all fields of medical treatment.