Katherine Martucci
Duke University, NC·Neuroscience
Opioid painkillers remain in use for months or years by many patients with chronic pain, even though they carry risks of overdose and addiction. What such prolonged exposure does to the nervous system itself is poorly charted.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
Psychology
- Topics
opioids
long-term opioid therapy
chronic pain
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Characterize how long-term opioid therapy alters brain response to reward probability, using task-based functional MRI in women with fibromyalgia scanned both while the opioid is active and while it is not.
- Measure resting-state functional connectivity, meaning how activity in separate regions rises and falls in step, within a key brain reward circuit across opioid users, opioid-naive patients and healthy controls.
- Test whether the spinal cord's response to noxious heat is changed in long-term opioid users, using high-resolution cervical spinal cord functional MRI timed to dose and blood opioid level.
- Relate resting connectivity between the spinal dorsal horns, the pain-receiving regions of the cord, to brain imaging measures and to clinical and cognitive-affective indicators of opioid misuse.
More about the research
This project maps those changes in two linked parts of the central nervous system: the brain circuits that process reward, and the pain-relay circuits of the spinal cord. Clearer answers could guide how patients taper off opioids and whether the changes can be undone.
Why it matters
National rates of opioid addiction and overdose death remain high while many pain patients keep using opioids. Measuring how the brain's reward circuitry and the spinal cord's pain circuitry change under long-term therapy could identify nervous-system targets for alternatives to opioids, suggest ways to reverse harmful changes, and support safer cessation for people living with conditions such as fibromyalgia.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Helen Kamens
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Neuroscience
Test whether baseline resting-state functional connectivity, measured by rsfMRI in awake male and female C57BL/6J mice, predicts how much morphine each mouse later drinks voluntarily.
Kenneth Weber
Stanford University, CA·Neuroscience
Improve spinal cord functional MRI with a 64-channel head-neck coil, segment-based alignment of scans and surface electromyography (muscle recordings) to remove motion noise, while mapping how the cord encodes touch intensity in 30 volunteers.
Manish Jha
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, TX·Neuroscience·Early-career
Identify patterns of resting-state functional connectivity linked to irritability, using 7 Tesla fMRI in 30 healthy adults and 60 adults with major depressive disorder.
The school
Duke University: 61 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 417 research doctorates a year.
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