Drs. Pradeep Suri and Patrick Heagerty, working together with a research group based primarily at King’s College London, were awarded the 2024 Outstanding Paper Award from the The Spine Journal and the North American Spine Society for the manuscript “The association of lumbar intervertebral disc degeneration with low back pain is modified by underlying genetic propensity to pain“. This study analyzed data from the UK Biobank and the TwinsUK cohort study. It found that a polygenic risk score for the extent of chronic pain stratified patients into subgroups of people where the association of MRI-detected lumbar intervertebral disc degeneration with low back pain was large and statistically significant, and other subgroups where the association of MRI-detected lumbar intervertebral disc degeneration and low back pain was small and/or non-significant. The authors conclude that genetically-predicted propensity to chronic pain modifies the LDD-LBP association, with the strongest association present in people with the highest genetic propensity to pain. This means that lumbar MRI findings may have stronger connections to LBP in specific subgroups of people. The full article can be found here:
https://www.thespinejournalonline.com/article/S1529-9430(24)00310-3/abstract