Marina Lopez-Sola, PhD

Biography & Affiliation Education Publications

Visit the Lopez-Sola Lab

Assistant Professor, UC Department of Anesthesia

Biography & Affiliation

Biography

Marina Lopez-Sola's work focuses on understanding the brain mechanisms and psychological processes that underlie somatic complaints and affective distress and recovery in chronic pain, depression and anxiety. Her research is mostly focused on the analysis and interpretation of functional brain imaging data, subjective measures of pain, emotion and thought content and psychophysiological and behavioral measures. She is currently working on identifying neural signatures of chronic pain conditions that are applicable to juvenile forms of chronic pain and can distinguish primary pain pathologies from primary depression and anxiety. She is also working on understanding the effects of social support and altruistic behavior as significant analgesic tools. On a similar line, she studies the brain mechanisms predicting positive response to mindfulness based cognitive therapy and somatosensory-based interventions in the context of pain and depression.

The Lopez-Sola Lab aims at significantly contributing to identify replicable and predictive brain-psyche-body markers that can help understand the specific, measurable mechanisms driving pain at the individual patient level. This work may help providing a better understanding of the iceberg underlying pain complaints for each young patient. If successful, the products of the work may be helpful to most effectively tailor preventive and treatment strategies for the individual patient.

Research Interests

fMRI; pain; brain marker; mvpa; signature; fibromyalgia; osteoarthritis; depression; anxiety; obsessive compulsive disorder

Academic Affiliation

Assistant Professor, UC Department of Anesthesia

Departments

Anesthesia, Imaging

Education

BS: Psychology, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain, 2005.

MS: Neuroscience, School of Medicine, University of Barcelona, Spain, 2007.

PhD: Neuroscience, School of Medicine, University of Barcelona, Spain, 2010.

Post-doctoral Research Fellowship: University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, 2012.

Publications

Lindquist MA, Krishnan A, López-Solà M, Jepma M, Woo CW, Koban L, et al. Group-regularized individual prediction: theory and application to pain. NeuroImage. 2017;145(Pt B):274-287.

López-Solà M, Woo CW, Pujol J, Deus J, Harrison BJ, Monfort J, Wager TD. Towards a Neurophysiological signature for fibromyalgia. Pain. 2017;158(1):34-47.

Krishnan A, Woo CW, Chang LJ, Ruzik L, Gu X, López-Solà M, Jackson PL, Pujol J, Fan J, Wager TD. Somatic and vicarious pain are represented by dissociable multivariate brain patterns. E-life. 2016;5:e15166.

Pujol J, Macià D, Garcia-Fontanals A, Blanco-Hinojo L, López-Solà M, et al. The contribution of sensory system functional connectivity reduction to clinical pain in fibromyalgia. Pain. 2014;155(8):1492-1503.

López-Solà M, Pujol J, Wager TD, Garcia-Fontanals A, Blanco-Hinojo L, Garcia-Blanco S, et al. Altered functional magnetic resonance imaging responses to nonpainful sensory stimulation in fibromyalgia patients. Arthritis and Rheumatology. 2014;66(11):3200-9.

López-Solà M, Pujol J, Hernández-Ribas R, Harrison BJ, Contreras-Rodríguez O, Soriano-Mas C, et al. Effects of duloxetine treatment on brain response to painful stimulation in major depressive disorder. Neuropsychopharmacology. 2010;35(11):2305-17.

López-Solà M, Pujol J, Hernández-Ribas R, Harrison BJ, Ortiz H, Soriano-Mas C, Deus J, Menchón JM, Vallejo J, Cardoner N. Dynamic assessment of the right lateral frontal cortex response to painful stimulation. Neuroimage. 2010;50(3):1177-87.

Pujol J, López-Solà M, Ortiz H, Vilanova JC, Harrison BJ, Yücel M, et al. Mapping brain response to pain in fibromyalgia patients using temporal analysis of FMRI. PLoS One. 2009;4(4):e5224.

Harrison BJ, Soriano-Mas C, Pujol J, Ortiz H, López-Solà M, Hernández-Ribas R, et al. Altered corticostriatal functional connectivity in obsessive-compulsive disorder. Archives of General Psychiatry. 2009;66(11):1189-200.

Harrison BJ, Pujol J, López-Solà M, Hernández-Ribas R, Deus J, Ortiz H, et al. Consistency and functional specialization in the default mode brain network. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 2008;105(28):9781-6.