Jun. Prof. Dr. Elena Enax-Krumova, Neurologische Universitätsklinik, BG-Kliniken Bergmannsheil, Faculty of Medicine
Research Programme:
I have been interested in neurological pain research since the beginning of my scientific work. One focus of my research is to investigate the underlying mechanisms of pain generation in various pain syndromes such as neuropathic pain of different origins, complex regional pain syndromes and post-traumatic headache using human-experimental pain models and in clinical studies. A further goal of my research is to identify risk patients at an early stage and to optimize the pharmacological and non-pharmacological treatment strategies and develop innovating rehabilitation approaches for patient groups at risk for insufficient treatment response.
Another focus of my W1 Professorship for Neuronal Regeneration at the Department of Neurology, of the BG University Hospital Bergmannsheil gGmbH Bochum is to develop and establish standardized monitoring for patients with nerve lesions regarding their motor and sensory deficits. The aim of this research is to correlate the regeneration processes to the primary injury pattern and to identify groups of patients who have a severe course of the disease and delayed healing. We hope that having this information we would be able to derive targeted treatment strategies and interventions to improve the neuronal regeneration.
For this purpose, we apply methods for the functional and morphological examination of the somatosensory nervous system, such as skin biopsies to determine the intraepidermal nerve fiber density, corneal confocal microscopy to examine the corneal nerve fibers, quantitative sensory testing and pain-associated electrically evoked potentials.