Chronic Back Pain is an interdisciplinary research project supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The project aims at new insights and diagnostic tools related to chronic back pain, which, although being the most common cause of work-related absence in western society, is still poorly understood. The general model of our consortium integrates higher cognitive levels, body schemes and internal models, the musculoskeletal system and pain processing instances.

The consortium is composed so as to span the entire width of the complex interactions that are involved in chronic back pain. By virtue of computational modeling of the above conceptual framework, we generate quantitative predictions, and test these interactively at the various levels of experimental manipulation. The cooperation with orthopaedic departments will help to implement the findings into new diagnostic tools and, eventually, into better suited therapies.