We are pleased to share our latest work, published in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, which presents a novel multilevel framework for nociplastic pain. Nociplastic pain, which arises from altered pain processing rather than clear tissue or nerve damage, remains one of the most challenging forms of chronic pain to understand and treat. This work is the result of a collaboration with Dr. Charalambos Papacharalambous and his team at the European University Cyprus, working together to develop his idea into a framework that brings clinical expertise and mechanistic research together.

A central message of the framework is that patients who share the same diagnosis can have very different underlying drivers of their pain. Relying on diagnostic labels alone, or on a single dominant mechanism, can therefore overlook much of what shapes an individual patient’s symptoms. By considering these contributors across multiple levels, the framework supports more precise clinical reasoning and better patient stratification. For clinicians, including physiotherapists, it points towards mechanism-informed assessment and targeted, multimodal rehabilitation strategies. For researchers, it offers a structure for linking mechanistic findings more directly to clinical questions.

We thank Ms. Neofyta Faidonos and our postdoc Dr. Andria Michael for their valuable contributions to this work. We look forward to building further on this partnership and to exploring how the framework can inform future research and clinical care.

The full article is available here.