A study of overlap and causality between chronic pain and depression

Given the starting premise, depression and chronic pain are often manifest in the same patients, I intend to investigate genetic and brain structural commonalities between these two conditions. This work would have two components: genetic association analysis and brain imaging. First, I would take the list of genetic variants previously associated with chronic pain conditions and run analysis on them to determine whether they are associated with depression in patients at the West China Hospital (host institution). Second, I would observe brain imaging done on the same patients to learn the procedure and analysis of output data. Lastly, I would compile a list of genetic variants that are associated with both chronic pain conditions and depression as well as brain regions that differ in both chronic pain patients and depression patients from healthy controls. TO BE CONT’D

Faculty Supervisor:

Luda Diatchenko

Student:

Partner:

Sichuan University

Discipline:

Life Sciences

Sector:

Education

University:

McGill University

Program: