Leorey Saligan

Leorey N. Saligan is a principal nurse investigator within the United States National Institutes of Health intramural research program.

His research interests center around fatigue, particularly fatigue experienced by cancer patients as a result of his parents both being diagnosed with cancer. He has developed an exercise intervention geared to improve aerobic metabolism of patients in order to potentially reduce oxidative stress, inflammation, and fatigue.

Controversy
In a very small uncontrolled study (n = 9) exploring the relationship between gene expression and pain catastrophizing in fibromyalgia, Saligan and his co-authors used a score of 16 on the Pain Catastrophizing Scale as the threshold for determination of "high catastrophizing". That is in stark contrast with the threshold of 30 recommended by the scale's creators to indicate a "clinically relevant level of catastrophizing," and a mean score for 851 injured workers was 20.90. Even the high catastrophizing subgroup (n = 5) in the study averaged a pain catastrophizing score of only 23.6, well below the recommended threshold. The authors concluded that "specific physiological pathways may possibly delineate pain and catastrophizing mechanisms."

Notable studies

 * Ongoing, NIH Post-Infectious ME/CFS Study

Editorial

 * Editorial - Understanding cancer-related fatigue: advancing the science, Full text by Michael Renner and Leorey N. Saligan

Talks & interviews

 * 2015, Is Medical Research for You? Meet Leorey Saligan, principal investigator in the Symptom Management Branch at the National Institutes of Health. Leorey’s research involves looking at blood samples from patients who have undergone cancer therapy and contributes to figuring out why cancer treatments cause fatigue

Online presence

 * PubMed
 * Twitter
 * Facebook
 * Website
 * YouTube

Learn more

 * NIH - Leorey Saligan
 * Energized by Fatigue