Measuring the Impact of Racism-Induced Medical Mistrust on Placebo Analgesia.

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PROJECT SUMMARY The overall goal of this five-year K23 Mentored Career Development Award is to provide critical research and career development opportunities that will facilitate the candidate’s long-term career goal of being a leading expert in neuropsychosocial mechanisms of pain treatment responses, particularly for underserved racial/ethnic groups. The proposed K23 activities will build on the candidate’s background in mind-body pain interventions, affective pain mechanisms, and resting-state fMRI methods through the completion of workshops, online coursework, mentor meetings, seminars, and conferences in the following areas: [1] pain disparities, [2] community-engaged research, [3] placebo analgesia, and [4] task-based fMRI. The candidate has assembled an outstanding team of co-mentors with expertise in pain disparities (primary mentor Dr. Claudia Campbell), community-engaged research (co-mentor Dr. Michele Evans), placebo analgesia (co-mentor Dr. Luana Colloca), and task-based fMRI (co-mentor Dr. Lauren Atlas) who will oversee her progress. Skills learned through the K23 career development plan will be practically applied in the completion of a research project examining the association between racism-induced medical mistrust (i.e., mistrust of healthcare systems due to the effects of structural and interpersonal racism), placebo analgesia (i.e., pain relief resultant from neuropsychological responses to contextual cues), and concomitant brain activity among Black adults living in the US sociocultural milieu. Placebo analgesia will be induced using a well-established protocol for the fMRI environment. Further, this project will be the first to collect information about placebo acceptability (i.e., admissibility to placebo as pain treatment) specifically among Black adults and will query for culturally responsive factors that can help boost placebo analgesia. Results from this project will provide critical pilot data that will support a large-scale grant submission aiming to optimize placebo analgesia interventions for US-residing Black adults. Further, the completion of the career development plan will give the candidate the necessary skills, resources, and community partnerships to build and maintain an independent program of research using state-of-the-art methods to improve pain treatment outcomes for underserved racial/ethnic groups.