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HIV-associated sensory neuropathy (HIV-SN) is one of the most common forms of peripheral neuropathy, affecting about 30% of people with acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). The symptoms of HIV-SN are do...
Intra-articular injection of monosodium iodoacetate (MIA) in the knee joint of rats disrupts chondrocyte metabolism resulting in cartilage degeneration and subsequent nociceptive behavior that has been describ...
Group I metabotropic glutamate receptor (mGluR1/5) signaling is an important mechanism of pain-related plasticity in the amygdala that plays a key role in the emotional-affective dimension of pain. Homer1a, th...
The discovery of heat-sensitive Transient Receptor Potential Vanilloid (TRPV) ion channels provided a potential molecular explanation for the perception of innocuous and noxious heat stimuli. TRPV1 has a signi...
Inhibitory interneurons constitute 30-40% of neurons in laminae I-III and have an important anti-nociceptive role. However, because of the difficulty in classifying them we know little about their organisation...
Nociceptive responses to noxious stimuli are initiated at peripheral nociceptor terminals. Ion channels play a vital role in pain signal initiation and conduction. Activation of KATP channels has been implicated ...
The transient receptor potential vanilloid type1 (TRPV1) is expressed in nociceptive sensory neurons and is sensitive to phosphorylation. A-Kinase Anchoring Protein 79/150 (AKAP150) mediates phosphorylation of...
Cyclic phosphatidic acid (cPA) is a structural analog of lysophosphatidic acid (LPA), but possesses different biological functions, such as the inhibition of autotaxin (ATX), an LPA-synthesizing enzyme. As LPA...
Voltage-gated sodium channel Nav1.7 is preferentially expressed in dorsal root ganglion (DRG) and sympathetic neurons within the peripheral nervous system. Homozygous or compound heterozygous loss-of-function mut...
Systemic administration of cannabinoid agonists is known to reduce pain induced by bladder inflammation and to modulate cystometric parameters in vivo. We have previously reported that intravesical administration...
Neuronal hyperexcitability is a crucial phenomenon underlying spontaneous and evoked pain. In invertebrate nociceptors, the S-type leak K+ channel (analogous to TREK-1 in mammals) plays a critical role of in dete...
A major clinical issue affecting 10-40% of cancer patients treated with oxaliplatin is severe peripheral neuropathy with symptoms including cold sensitivity and neuropathic pain. Rat models have been used to d...
High frequency electrical stimulation (HFS) of primary nociceptive afferents in humans induce a heightened sensitivity in the surrounding non-stimulated skin area. Several studies suggest that this heterotopic...
Voltage-gated sodium channels (VGSCs) play an important role in the control of membrane excitability. We previously reported that the excitability of nociceptor was increased by hypotonic stimulation. The pres...
Galanin is expressed at low levels in the intact sensory neurons of the dorsal root ganglia with a dramatic increase after peripheral nerve injury. The neuropeptide is also expressed in primary afferent termin...
The local administration of μ-opioid receptor (MOR) agonists attenuates neuropathic pain but the precise mechanism implicated in this effect is not completely elucidated. We investigated if nitric oxide synthe...
Hedonic reward, dependence and addiction are unwanted effects of opioid analgesics, linked to the phasic cycle of μ opioid receptor activation, tolerance and withdrawal. In vitro studies of recombinant G protein ...
(-)-Pentazocine has been hypothesized to induce analgesia via the κ-opioid (KOP) receptor, although the involvement of other opioid receptor subtypes in the effects of pentazocine remains unknown. In this stud...
The GDNF family ligands (GFLs) are regulators of neurogenic inflammation and pain. We have previously shown that GFLs increase the release of the sensory neuron neuropeptide, calcitonin gene-related peptide (C...
The role of serotonin (5-hydroxytrptamine, 5-HT) in the modulation of pain has been widely studied. Previous work led to the hypothesis that 5-hydroxyindolacetic acid (5-HIAA), a main metabolite of serotonin, ...
Long-term potentiation (LTP) in nociceptive spinal pathways shares several features with hyperalgesia and has been proposed to be a cellular mechanism of pain amplification in acute and chronic pain states. Sp...
Functional acupoint specificity is crucial to the clinical efficacy of acupuncture treatment, such as pain relief. Whether acupuncture needling at a peripheral acupoint produces distinct patterns of brain resp...
Two main classes of peripheral sensory neurons contribute to thermal pain sensitivity: the unmyelinated C fibers and thinly myelinated Aδ fibers. These two fiber types may differentially underlie different cli...
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are short non-coding RNAs that inhibit translation of target genes by binding to their mRNAs. The expression of numerous brain-specific miRNAs with a high degree of temporal and spatial spec...
Neuropathic pain is a common clinical condition. Current treatments are often inadequate, ineffective, or produce potentially severe adverse effects. Understanding the mechanisms that underlie the development ...
Mechanisms underlying pain in chronic pancreatitis (CP) are incompletely understood. Our previous data showed that astrocytes were actively involved. However, it was unclear how astrocytic activation was induc...
Increased neuronal excitability and spontaneous firing are hallmark characteristics of injured sensory neurons. Changes in expression of various voltage-gated Na+ channels (VGSCs) have been observed under neuropa...
P2Y1 is a member of the P2Y family of G protein-coupled nucleotide receptors expressed in peripheral sensory neurons. Using ratiometric calcium imaging of isolated dorsal root ganglion neurons, we found that the ...
The aim of this study is to clarify the neural mechanisms underlying orofacial pain abnormalities after cervical spinal nerve injury. Nocifensive behavior, phosphorylated extracellular signal-regulated kinase ...
Protein interacting with C Kinase 1 (PICK1), a PDZ domain-containing scaffolding protein, interacts with multiple different proteins in the mammalian nervous system and is believed to play important roles in d...
Acid-sensing ion channels (ASICs) have a significant role in the sensation of pain and constitute an important target for the search of new antinociceptive drugs. In this work we studied the antinociceptive pr...
The mouse mu opioid receptor (OPRM1) gene undergoes extensive alternative splicing at both the 3'- and 5'-ends of the gene. Previously, several C-terminal variants generated through 3' splicing have been ident...
Oxaliplatin is a platinum-based chemotherapy drug characterized by the development of acute and chronic peripheral neuropathies. The chronic neuropathy is a dose-limiting toxicity. We previously reported that ...
Neuropathic pain is a chronic disease resulting from dysfunction within the "pain matrix". The basolateral amygdala (BLA) can modulate cortical functions and interactions between this structure and the medial ...
Group II metabotropic glutamate receptors (mGluRs) couple to the inhibitory G-protein Gi. The group II mGluRs include two subtypes, mGlu2 and mGlu3, and their pharmacological activation produces analgesic effe...
Previous studies in several different trigeminal nerve injury/inflammation models indicated that the hyperexcitability of primary afferent neurons contributes to the pain pathway underlying mechanical allodyni...
Tissue injury elicits both hypersensitivity to evoked stimuli and ongoing, stimulus-independent pain. We previously demonstrated that pain relief elicits reward in nerve-injured rats. This approach was used to...
The aim of this study was to obtain evidences of a possible analgesic role for palmitoylethanolamide (PEA) in chronic granulomatous inflammation sustained by mast cell (MC) activation in rats at 96 hours. PEA ...
Local anesthetics alleviate neuropathic pain in some cases in clinical practice, and exhibit longer durations of action than those predicted on the basis of the pharmacokinetics of their blocking effects on vo...
A preconditioning stimulus can trigger a neuroprotective phenotype in the nervous system - a preconditioning nerve lesion causes a significant increase in axonal regeneration, and cerebral preconditioning prot...
Dorsal root ganglia (DRG)-neurons are commonly characterized immunocytochemically. Cells are mostly grouped by the experimenter's eye as "marker-positive" and "marker-negative" according to their immunofluores...
N-type Ca2+ channels (Cav2.2) play an important role in the transmission of pain signals to the central nervous system. ω-Conotoxin (CTx)-MVIIA, also called ziconotide (Prialt®), effectively alleviates pain, with...
Mice deficient for the stable tubule only peptide (STOP) display altered dopaminergic neurotransmission associated with severe behavioural defects including disorganized locomotor activity. Endogenous morphine...
The transcriptional repressor DREAM (downstream regulatory element antagonist modulator) controls the expression of prodynorphin and has been involved in the modulation of endogenous responses to pain. To inve...
Ablation of TRPV1-expressing nociceptive fibers with the potent capsaicin analog resiniferatoxin (RTX) results in long lasting pain relief. RTX is particularly adaptable to focal application, and the induced c...
Neuroplasticity in the central nucleus of the amygdala (CeA), particularly its latero-capsular division (CeLC), is an important contributor to the emotional-affective aspects of pain. Previous studies showed s...
It has been shown that estrogen is synthesized in the spinal dorsal horn and plays a role in modulating pain transmission. One of the estrogen receptor (ER) subtypes, estrogen receptor alpha (ERα), is expresse...
Inflammation and pain associated with temporomandibular joint disorder, a chronic disease that affects 15% of the adult population, involves activation of trigeminal ganglion nerves and development of peripher...
The CCR2/CCL2 system has been identified as a regulator in the pathogenesis of neuropathy-induced pain. However, CCR2 target validation in analgesia and the mechanism underlying antinociception produced by CCR...
Glial cells have been shown to directly participate to the genesis and maintenance of chronic pain in both the sensory ganglia and the central nervous system (CNS). Indeed, glial cell activation has been repor...