News/Events
Events
The REACH Enrichment Program features various events covering a broad variety of topics such as mind/body interactions, pathophysiology of spinal pathologies, practices and evidence for integrative medicine approaches, precision medicine, and big data analytic methods. REACH events will vary in scope and format, from seminars, face-to-face networking and social events, to workshops that enable REACH investigators, faculty, students, and the general public to interact with one other.
News
November 2020 - Coming soon: patient recruitment for comeBACK study
The REACH Clinical Core is launching the comeBACK study - a longitudinal, multicenter, observational study of chronic low back pain (cLBP). The study is led by Core Directors Conor O’Neill, MD, Dennis Black, PhD, and Patricia Zheng, MD at UCSF, plus the comeBACK Site Directors (Scott Fishman, MD (UCD); Shalini Shah, MD (UCI); Mark Wallace, MD (UCSD). They plan to recruit 400 patients across the four clinical sites with up to 24 months of follow-up. The objective of the comeBACK study is to perform deep phenotyping of cLBP patients based on combined biopsychosocial variables to define cLBP subtypes, establish related phenotyping tools for routine clinical evaluation, and improve cLBP outcomes. Stay tuned for more information regarding the comeBACK website launch and patient recruitment!
October 2020 - REACH seminar recordings available on YouTube
The REACH YouTube Channel features previously recorded presentations from our event series. The below seminars can be accessed at any time and include those from the August REACH Symposium “The role of muscles in chronic low back pain.” The half-day virtual event featured lively discussion throughout with over 70 attendees from close to 20 different institutions and organizations attending, and included speakers from UCSF, UCSD, and NIH. Click on each link below to access the recorded video presentation.
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Dr. Sibel Deviren (UCSF): “Clinical phenotype of muscle-related chronic low back pain”
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Dr. Brian Feeley (UCSF): “Regenerative capacity of paraspinal muscles”
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Dr. Roland Krug (UCSF): “Muscle MRI: methods and applications”
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Dr. Howard Fields (UCSF): "Pain, a motivation decision model"
August 2020 - Dr. Howard Fields seminar recap available on YouTube
Renowned pain expert, Dr. Howard Fields MD, PhD (Professor Emeritus at the UCSF Department of Neurology & Physiology), presented a REACH seminar entitled “Pain: A motivation-decision model” on June 19, 2020 via Zoom. Nearly 30 researchers from across the country virtually attended to hear Dr. Fields. He described predictive cues that can modulate pain and how patient expectations/behaviors can often predict clinical outcomes. The seminar concluded with a discussion of clinical implications, such as how ongoing nociceptive input produces biases toward pain avoidance responses, and that early success with initial treatments influences patient expectations and optimism as it relates to pain.
June 2020 - Dr. Jeffrey Lotz was featured in a recent NIH HEAL Initiative article about modeling efforts surrounding chronic low back pain: https://heal.nih.gov/news/stories/bacpac-low-back-pain.