Anson Kairys
University of Michigan, MI·Neuroscience·Early-career
Fibromyalgia (FM) is a chronic condition marked by widespread pain, emotional distress and problems with thinking. Patients often call these thinking problems "fibro fog" and describe them as among the most disabling parts of the illness.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
Psychology
- Topics
fibromyalgia
chronic pain
cognitive dysfunction
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2029
What they work on
- Compare subjective (self-reported) and objective (test-based) cognitive function between people with fibromyalgia and healthy controls, and assess how co-occurring symptoms shape the relationship between the two.
- Use electroencephalography (EEG) recorded during a memory task sensitive to early cognitive impairment to identify neural biomarkers of cognitive dysfunction in fibromyalgia.
- Analyze functional MRI (fMRI) data from a subset of fibromyalgia patients to test how brain responses to pain relate to cognitive symptoms.
More about the research
Studies find both measurable cognitive deficits and patient complaints. However, the two often disagree, and little is known about how they relate to changes in the brain. Doctors also lack sensitive biomarkers, measurable signals that track cognitive problems, which would be needed to develop treatments.
Why it matters
Cognitive symptoms in fibromyalgia are poorly understood and therefore poorly managed. Similar symptoms also occur in many other chronic pain conditions. Clearer descriptions of these symptoms and EEG-based biomarkers could improve diagnosis and guide future treatments, such as neuromodulation. That could benefit the many people living with chronic pain, a problem affecting over one in three Americans and costing about $600 billion each year.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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University of Minnesota, MN·Neuroscience
Test whether visual snow arises from excess spontaneous neural activity in visual brain areas by comparing adaptation-based perception tests in people with visual snow syndrome and normally sighted controls.
Jasmin Cloutier
University of Delaware, DE·Psychology
Compare brain activity, measured with functional MRI, while people form first impressions of human versus artificial intelligence (AI) partners.
Philip Kragel
Emory University, GA·Neuroscience
Evaluate whether different superior colliculus pathways serve distinct functions, using machine learning models of brain connectivity while people perform avoidance learning, spatial attention and aversive-viewing tasks during fMRI.
The school
University of Michigan: 124 labs on PI Pages, $2.1B a year on research, 963 research doctorates a year.
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