Publications by authors named "I D'Amato"

Missing aspects of the heritability of chronic neuropathic pain, as a complex adult-onset trait, may be hidden within rare variants with low effect on disease risk, unlikely to be resolved by a single-variant approach. To identify new risk genes, we performed a next-generation sequencing of 107 pain genes and collapsed the rare variants through gene-wise aggregation analysis. The optimal unified sequence kernel association test was applied to 169 patients with painful neuropathy, 223 patients with nociplastic pain (82 diagnosed with chronic widespread pain and 141 with fibromyalgia), and 216 healthy controls.

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Personalized management of neuropathic pain is an unmet clinical need due to heterogeneity of the underlying aetiologies, incompletely understood pathophysiological mechanisms and limited efficacy of existing treatments. Recent studies on microRNA in pain preclinical models have begun to yield insights into pain-related mechanisms, identifying nociception-related species differences and pinpointing potential drug candidates. With the aim of bridging the translational gap towards the clinic, we generated a human pain-related integrative miRNA and mRNA molecular profile of the epidermis, the tissue hosting small nerve fibres, in a deeply phenotyped cohort of patients with sodium channel-related painful neuropathy not responding to currently available therapies.

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Mutations in the alpha subunit of voltage-gated sodium channel 1.7 (NaV1.7), encoded by SCN9A gene, play an important role in the regulation of nociception and can lead to a wide range of clinical outcomes, ranging from extreme pain syndromes to congenital inability to experience pain.

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Pomegranate ( L.) is one of the historical tree crops in the Mediterranean region and is nowadays commercialized for its beneficial properties in the form of fruits, juice, jams and, in some East countries, as fermented juice (pomegranate wine). However, pomegranate wines are not established as a common beverage in Western countries.

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Congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP) is a rare autosomal recessive disorder presenting with a spectrum of clinical features caused by mutations in different genes. A 10-year-old girl with CIP, hyposmia and hypogeusia, and her unaffected twin and parents underwent next generation sequencing of SCN9A exons and flanking splice sites. Transcript analysis from whole blood successfully assayed the effect of the mutation on the mRNA splicing by polymerase chain reaction amplification on cDNA and Sanger sequencing.

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