Research Capacity Building
Saskatchewan’s health research environment continues to strengthen. Research capacity indicators and metrics usually fall into a number of subgroups that represent personnel, additional research-activity funding, and infrastructure growth.
For SHRF, key indicators in this impact area focus on research personnel and grant success.
Definition: Percent of SHRF Establishment grant holders attaining a major grant five-years post SHRF award Other major research grants ($25,000 or more) received among all funded Establishment Grantees who responded
Source: SHRF Five-year follow-up study 
Definition: Percent of Saskatchewan researchers working in one or more of the provincial health research priority areas Researchers could be identified in more than one priority area
Source: SHRF publication A Descriptive Report on Health Research Capacity in Saskatchewan (2010) 
Definition: Percent of SHRF Establishment grant holders still in Saskatchewan five-years post SHRF award
Source: SHRF Five-year follow-up study
Story
Gordon Asmundson
The Pain in our Heads
“This is going to hurt.”
Did you just wince? If you did, you’ve just demonstrated the power of our thoughts to affect our bodies.
This mind-pain link is the province of Dr. Gordon Asmundson at the University of Regina.
“What we’ve found is that fear itself serves as a mechanism to maintain chronic pain,” he says. “For example, even after an injury has healed, the fear of pain will often keep a person from exercising or doing other activities associated with pain, leading to physical deconditioning, which leads in turn to more pain.”
Asmundson’s research has determined that fear and anxiety disorders can worsen chronic pain. This is perhaps most marked in cases of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Popular perception of PTSD has it as a “battlefield disease” (think “shell shock”), but it can arise from numerous causes. These include violent physical attack by another person or by a natural disaster. But it also can include observing violence, such as witnessing a car crash, or even being told about such events by another person.
Through his research, Asmundson has become an international authority in the fields of chronic pain and anxiety disorders, including PTSD. He has written more than 240 journal articles and book chapters on these subjects and is author and co-author of several books, including “It’s Not All in Your Head: How worrying about your health could be making you sick and what you can do about it;” “Understanding and Treating Fear of Pain;” and “Health Anxiety Disorders: A Clinical Guide to Assessment and Treatment.”
An active clinical researcher and mentor, his graduate students are also regular recipients of prestigious awards and five have received the Brain Star Award from the
Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) in the past several years.
When Asmundson first moved to Saskatchewan from Manitoba, he received a New Investigator Award through HSURC (an ancestor to SHRF), which helped to set the stage for future success. His first study resulted in a large number of published papers, which helped him secure further grants through HSURC, and later, a regional partnership program (RPP) grant funded by the province and CIHR.
These initial successes bolstered his confidence to go after further national funding, and his career snowballed from there.
“I needed that initial funding to really get me going,” he says. “I think of my early research as a small snowball at the top of a hill. That first bit of funding was the push that got the ball rolling. It picked up size and speed thereafter.”
Today, Asmundson continues his work on PTSD and its links with chronic pain. He and his team have found that PTSD and chronic pain tend to result from similar experiences, but the pain is often medically unexplained. He hopes to discover if traumatic experiences alter the way that people perceive and process pain, which may help explain why these conditions tend to co-occur. This knowledge could lead to improved treatments that deal with both conditions.
Asmundson’s efforts have not gone unnoticed. In 2008, he received SHRF’s Achievement Award and in 2009 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the highest academic accolade for a scientist or scholar in this country.
