Lydia Coxon

I am a post-doc researcher in the Pain in Women and the EndoCaRe research groups.

I am interested in investigating pelvic pain mechanisms. I have particularly worked on endometriosis-associated pain and how stratification of patients can aid our understanding and inform our treatment of women with endometriosis-associated pain. In my work I use methods from pain neuroscience, such as questionnaires, sensory testing and neuroimaging, to better understand pelvic pain.

I am currently working on the RoADPain study, which investigates dysmenorrhoea (period pain) in adolescents. We aim to determine: whether adolescent dysmenorrhoea is an independent risk factor for the development of chronic pain in young women; whether there is dysfunction in pain-relevant systems in adolescents with dysmenorrhoea in the early years of menstruation; and to identify any factor present in childhood that increase the risk of dysmenorrhoea developing early in menstrual life.

I also have worked on the Translational Research in Pelvic Pain (TRiPP) study, which focuses on two specific types of chronic pain: endometriosis-associated pain (EAP) and bladder pain syndrome (BPS). The main hypothesis of TRiPP is that the pain symptoms experienced by women with these conditions are generated and maintained by mechanisms similar to those found in other chronic pain conditions, but occur in combination with specific pathological lesions and symptoms. We believe that reconceptualising these conditions in the context of the multi system dysfunction known for other chronic pain conditions rather than as end-organ pathologies has the potential to revolutionise our understanding of the conditions, allow us to identify meaningful subgroups of patients, develop better preclinical models and thus ultimately facilitate drug development in this field.

During my DPhil (completed 2021) in the group I investigated neuropathic-like pain in endometriosis using a variety of different techniques including questionnaires, fMRI and QST data.

Prior to joining the group I completed BA Neuroscience (2017) at the University of Oxford.