4TH PLACE, LITERATURE REVIEW TRACK: The dialect of chromatin in chronic pain and its distortion under opioid exposure

Chronic pain affects over 50 million individuals in the United States and as much as one in ten adults worldwide also experience it, yet there is no reliable treatment. Given the multifaceted nature of its clinical management, where management must consider the physical, mental, and behavioral aspects, chronic pain is a hard to combat condition. Remarkably, emerging evidence has begun to reveal relationships between chromatin structure modifications, such as histone modifications, DNA methylation, and noncoding RNA, and the regulation of chronic pain signaling. This review will discuss the chronic pain regulatory systems and their functional relationships with epigenetic modifications at its development. We aim to highlight the importance of epigenetics and chromatin signaling in developing and maintaining the gene-expression distorted under a chronic condition. We suggest potential treatments based on the individual genome of chronic pain patients towards a personalized therapy.