The National Football League (NFL) and the NFL Players Association (NFLPA) recently awarded more than half a million dollars to medical researchers, including two pain specialists at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), to study non-opioid alternatives for treating post-traumatic headache, a common after-effect of concussion and other forms of traumatic brain injury.
Post-traumatic headache (PTH) is a poorly treated, highly debilitating headache disorder where medications and other options for treatment aren’t very effective, said Erika Petersen, M.D., a professor of neurosurgery at UAMS who chairs the multispecialty Sports Management Task Force for the American Society for Pain and Neuroscience (ASPN).
In July, Petersen became the executive board president of the ASPN, whose medical researchers shared $526,525 with their counterparts at Emory University for the purpose of investigating innovative pain-management methods that could benefit NFL players and society at large. Petersen will be a primary investigator for her group’s study, to be called “A Pilot Study Assessing Noninvasive Treatment of Refractory Post-Concussion Headache Pain.”
Johnathan Goree, MD, a UAMS associate professor of anesthesiology and director of the Division of Chronic Pain, is also a member of the task force, which developed the study’s research plan, and will participate on the study steering committee.
“ASPN is very excited for the research grant,” Petersen said. “Given that more than 3.8 million people are diagnosed with concussion in the United States annually, the persistence of PTH should be considered a substantial public health concern.”
She said the ASPN researchers, who received about $350,000 of the grant money, will study cannabidiol (CBD) and noninvasive vagal nerve stimulation (nVNS) in PTH patients.
“We will compare standard of care treatment for PTH to these two promising, less-studied options,” she said. “Our hypothesis is that both nVNS and CBD will reduce headache days and headache severity compared to standard of care treatment. The study will specifically be enrolling former contact-sport athletes with a history of concussion who have PTH. ASPN will be directing the research at about a dozen sites within 25 miles of an NFL franchise.”
Emory researchers, meanwhile, will study mindfulness-based intervention in sports medicine injuries.
“These awards are the second round chosen by the NFL-NFLPA Joint Pain Management Committee, which aims to facilitate research to better understand and improve potential alternative pain management treatments for NFL players,” according to the football league.