Figure 2

Percutaneous application of RTX to the sciatic nerve and sciatic plus saphenous nerves minimally effects response to heat stimuli. RTX (250 ng, 50 μl) application to only the sciatic nerve produced a transient change in heat withdrawal latency with respect to testing time (*P < 0.05, 1 way ANOVA, Scheffe post-hoc analysis), as compared to the baseline. Additional application of RTX to the saphenous nerve produced a modest increase in heat latency, but this effect was not significantly different, as compared to the sciatic group. The "sciatic nerve" group refers to animals treated only with percutaneous RTX (N = 24) and the "sciatic and saphenous nerves" group refers to animals that were injected percutaneously near the sciatic nerve and had an open field injection around the saphenous nerve (N = 15). The "control group" represents the uninjected right hindpaw. There was no difference between contralateral controls for the sciatic nerve group (N = 24) and the sciatic/saphenous group (N = 15), therefore these groups were combined (N = 39) for subsequent comparisons.