Nathan Wood finished his first year at the Wayne State University School of Medicine in May, and the Class of 2018 student has already published his first academic paper.
"Characteristics of Fibromyalgia Independently Predict Poorer Long-Term Analgesic Outcomes Following Total Knee and Hip Arthroplasty" was published in the May issue of Arthritis and Rheumatology.
The paper comes out of work Wood performed as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. The work earned him third place in the Clinical Studies Oral Presentations category at the WSU School of Medicine's 2015 Medical Student Research Symposium in January.
"This is my first published work, and I feel very grateful to have been a part of it. I gained invaluable experience working with the orthopaedic surgeons and Chad Brummett, M.D. (assistant professor of Pain Medicine for U-M), who was as much of a mentor and friend as he was a preceptor," Wood said. "It's always satisfying to see your hard work pay off,but even better when you can celebrate it with people with whom you've worked so closely and for so long."
Despite being a linguistics major, Wood applied as a 17-year-old freshman to work as a research assistant on Dr. Brummett's research team in the school's Department of Anesthesiology. "As the story goes, he gave me a pity interview at the request of his study coordinator, with no plans of ever hiring me. Apparently something went well in the interview, though, because I was hired that day," Wood said.
Wood hopes to continue his involvement in clinical research in pain medicine and surgery, both now in medical school and in his prospective career as an academic physician.
He is conducting research this summer through the Henry Ford Health System's Department of Plastic Surgery in Detroit, and hopes to continue being involved in his undergraduate mentor's research.
"I am excited to see what future works this research might inspire and where the field of pain medicine and arthritic treatments goes from here," he said.
The Brummett lab set out to see whether it could predict in advance which patients would "fail" their knee or hip replacement, and found that patient answers to a four-question "2011 Fibromyalgia Survey Questionnaire" predicted with statistical significance how they would respond to a total knee or hip replacement. The survey quantifies how fibromyalgia-like a patient's symptoms are. The more fibromyalgia-like features a patient has, the more likely he or she is to derive little to no reduction in pain from a knee or hip replacement.
"With these findings, we argue two things. One is that a large proportion of the patients who 'fail' their lower limb joint replacement do so because of their preexisting fibromyalgia-like symptoms; we believe these symptoms are indicative of something called 'augmented centralized pain processing,' meaning their bodies process pain differently," Wood said. "Our second argument is that this short survey could be used in orthopaedic surgery offices to help patients considering a knee or hip replacement develop realistic goals in regards to their expected pain relief."