Professor of Pediatrics, Anesthesiology, Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences, UCLA

Interest Statement

I have a particular interest in gender differences in pain and pathways to pain in women versus men. I study children’s pain responses in the laboratory as well as risk factors in children with chronic pain to understand why there is a higher prevalence of chronic pain problems in women as they emerge from childhood into adolescence.

I am also studying interventions that might be particularly suited to women, and to mothers and daughters to break the transgenerational cycle of chronic pain. My additional interest in adult survivors of childhood cancer has also led to an interest in why women survivors have more pain problems then do male survivors and how to develop preventive strategies to reduce the likelihood of the development of chronic pain

Biography

Lonnie Zeltzer, MD, is a Professor of Pediatrics, Anesthesiology, Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Director of the Pediatric Pain Program at the Mattel Children’s Hospital at UCLA, Associate Director of the Patients and Survivors Program, Division of Cancer Prevention and Control Research, UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, and past-medical director of Trinity Kidscare Pediatric Hospice.

Her program’s research focuses on pediatric chronic pain, end of life care in children, complementary and alternative therapies, and quality of life in survivors of childhood cancer. She has guided many collaborative clinical trials in analgesics in children, and is on the steering committee of the NIH-funded Childhood Cancer Survivor Study. She is the Chairman of the Cancer Prevention and Control Research Committee of the American Cancer Society and an NIH study section member.

She has received many awards, including a WT Grant Faculty Scholar’s Award, a Research Career Development Award from the NCI, the 2002 Physician Excellence Award from Trinity Hospice, the 2003 UCLA Helene Brown Award for Excellence in Cancer Control Research, a 2005 Mayday Pain and Policy Fellowship, the 2005 American Pain Society’s Jeffrey Lawson Award for Advocacy in Children’s Pain Relief, and is president-elect of the Pediatric SIG of the International Association for the Study of Pain. She is the Secretary of the American Pain Society and a member of the executive board of the American Pain Foundation. She has over 200 publications, including her book, Conquering your Child’s Chronic Pain: a Pediatrician’s Guide for Reclaiming a Normal Childhood, (HarperCollins, 2005).

She has been in the media, with recent examples including NPR, as well as ABC’s Good Morning America and the Evening News with Peter Jennings.