ACR REF Award Provides Big Research Career Break

Dr. Allen applied for and received the award in 2005. With her REF award funding, she was able to lead her own research project to study pain self-assessment among patients with osteoarthritis in an attempt to better understand patterns of pain variation and identify possible influences on pain variation, such as site of pain, gender, or race. Now in her second year of the project, Dr. Allen is pleased with the volume of data she has gathered through patients’ self reporting using personal digital assistants (PDAs), and she looks forward to reviewing and analyzing her findings in the coming months.

“I think using PDA devices may be an important complementary approach to traditional pain assessment tools that rely on pain recall, since use of PDAs allows information to be captured in the moment, as opposed to hours, or even days, later,” comments Dr. Allen. “We also hope that patients using these devices may develop a better understanding of what may trigger or prolong their bouts of pain, and that they will be able to more effectively communicate with their physicians about these issues. Thinking long-term and larger-scale, this process for pain assessment has the potential to be very useful in other clinical and research trials. It could also conceivably be adapted to an online system that would translate to clinical practice.”

Of her award experience, Dr. Allen says, “The whole process, while entailing a lot of work and effort, has been really fun and rewarding. The return on my investment of time has been absolutely invaluable. I now have experience leading my own research project—and that opens so many new doors for me.”

The ACR REF Health Professional New Investigator Award is part of the REF’s extensive awards and grants portfolio. It encourages health professionals new to rheumatology to pursue rheumatology research careers by supporting a structured research project.