Leaders in Research

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Anne Louise Oaklander, MD, PhD Associate Professor of Neurology Massachusetts General Hospital Harvard Medical School Anne Louise Oaklander, M.D., Ph.D. Anne Louise Oaklander MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology and Neurology at Harvard Medical School, and an Assistant Neurologist and Neuropathologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital. After an undergraduate degree in Neuroscience from Cornell University, she received her MD and PhD from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine where she studied the cell biology of peripheral nerve degeneration. She was selected as Chief Resident during her neurology residency at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and is Board Certified in Neurology. She moved to the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine where she was awarded an NIH fellowship to study Peripheral Nerve Disease with Dr. Jack Griffin in the Department of Neurology. She then completed a fellowship in Neurosurgical Management of Pain at Hopkins. She joined the Neurosurgery faculty at Hopkins and, in 1998, moved to Mass General where she is an attending physician in the MGH Pain Center. She is nationally recognized for her clinical expertise in diagnosis and management of chronic neuropathic pain, and for her research studies that usually use actual human pain patients. Dr. Oaklander's group, the Neuropathic Pain Study Group (NPSG), is especially known for studies of patients with and without postherpetic neuralgia (PHN) after shingles, a common disease in geriatric patients. She has established that the presence of PHN after shingles is associated with degeneration of the same type of neuron that conveys messages of acute pain (nociceptors). She has proposed that ongoing pain in PHN is a somatosensory hallucination of intraspinal pain neurons that are deprived of normal input from the periphery. With the help of the Beeson funding, she is investigating whether similar mechanisms underlie the development of chronic pain in diabetic neuropathy and in Complex Regional Pain Syndrome after nerve injury. She is also the author of a publication about postherpetic itch (PHI) after shingles. In 2001, she founded the Center for Shingles and Postherpetic Neuralgia at MGH (www.shinglescenter.org) to provide quality medical information about these diseases to the public.

Primary Research (for Beeson Program): Preliminary Epidemiologic, Clinical, and Scientific Information about Postherpetic Itch (PHI)