For Kara Davis, the difference between her seventh grade self and who she is today at age 19 is night and day. Growing up, chronic stomach pain kept her home from school and made her miss out on having fun with friends and family. “Before, I was living a bogged-down black-and-white life,” she says, looking back on a childhood marked by crippling stomach issues. “Now, I’m at the light at the end of the tunnel.”

“It’s difficult seeing your kid in pain,” says Kara’s mom, Sondra Davis. Kara would often get in trouble at school for missing so many days, and Sondra just wanted to help her daughter find relief.

Hope for a solution came when the Davises found out about a Michigan State University study supported by a federal grant from the National Institutes of Health, or NIH. It offered access to simple pain management tools that would soon prove to be life-changing for Kara — as well as promising treatments for children who struggle with chronic pain.

“I’ve had stomach issues for as long as I can remember,” says Kara Davis. As a child, she would miss out on school, camping trips and sleepovers.Photo by Jacob Templin-Fulton

Developed by Natoshia Cunningham, an associate professor of family medicine in the MSU College of Human Medicine who leads a lab that studies pediatric pain, the study followed a six-session program that includes both in-person therapy sessions and online self-management tools. The program, called ADAPT, short for Aim to Decrease Anxiety and Pain Treatment, uses cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, to teach children with abdominal pain disorders strategies to manage their symptoms. Over the course of her career, Cunningham has received multiple NIH grants to develop and test ADAPT. In the NIH-funded study Kara participated in, Cunningham used neuroimaging techniques to understand how children’s brains change after access to this effective intervention.