DrPaul Strutton

I am an Associate Professor (Reader) in Human Neurophysiology and run the Nick Davey Laboratory within the MSk lab in the department of Surgery and Cancer. I received my BSc in Neuroscience and PhD in Physiology from King’s College London before taking up a post-doctoral position with Alison McGregor (Professor of Musculoskeletal Biodynamics, Surgery & Cancer) and the late Dr Nick Davey (Neuroscience) at Imperial College London investigating the central nervous system control of muscles in patients with low back pain.

Research

My research interests include investigation of the neural control of movement using non-invasive brain and nerve stimulation techniques, e.g. transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), under normal and pathological conditions such as spinal cord injury and low back pain.

Recent work showed that contractions of the upper limb muscles could increase the excitability of the voluntary movement pathways controlling the trunk muscles
This work led to a grant from the INSPIRE foundation to study these interactions in people with spinal cord injury (SCI) and this work showed that these interactions correlated with trunk function in SCI subjects.
The results of this work led to a further grant (in collaboration with Dr Chloe Chiou at the University of Birmingham) from the INSPIRE foundation to investigate how these arm movements might improve function of the trunk as part of rehabilitation.

I am also involved in a pioneering research project with clinicians and scientists in Poland developing a treatment to cure paralysis using transplantation of patients' own olfactory ensheathing cells (OEC) into the spinal cord.

My group's work on imaging of compressed spinal nerves in patients with sciatica, funded by the Dunhill Medical Trust, revealed that the metrics derived from the novel imagine technique correlated with clinical symptoms and the information gained from this technique will help to improve the diagnosis and predict the outcome of spinal surgery.
I also studied endogenous analgesic processes in human surrogate pain models with post-doc Dr Sam Hughes (now senior lecturer in pain neuroscience at the University of Exeter). As part of this programme of work, we demonstrated that virtual reality and non-invasive brain stimulation can modulate perceptual correlates of endogenous analgesia in healthy participants. We were then awarded a grant from the Pain Relief Foundation to study the effects non-invasive brain stimulation on pain in patients with sciatica.

I am currently a member of the Society for Neuroscience, the Physiological Society, the Anatomical Society of Great Britain & Ireland and am on the National Scientific Committee of the INSPIRE foundation. I served on the Executive committee of the Society for Back Pain Research.