Comment on "Molecular and neural basis of contagious itch behavior in mice".

Response to Comment on "Molecular and neural basis of contagious itch behavior in mice".

Liljencrantz et al report the failure of observing contagious itch behavior using mice injected with histamine as the demonstrators. Analysis of their results shows that the histamine model is limited by inadequate frequency and duration of scratching bouts required for contagious itch test. To streamline the contagious itch test, the screen paradigm is highly recommended.

Neural basis of contagious itch and why some people are more prone to it.

Watching someone scratch himself can induce feelings of itchiness in the perceiver. This provides a unique opportunity to characterize the neural basis of subjective experiences of itch, independent of changes in peripheral inputs. In this study, we first established that the social contagion of itch is essentially a normative response (experienced by most people), and that the degree of contag...

Contagious itch: what we know and what we would like to know

All humans experience itch in the course of their life. Even a discussion on the topic of itch or seeing people scratch can evoke the desire to scratch. These events are coined "contagious itch" and are very common. We and others have shown that videos showing people scratching and pictures of affected skin or insects can induce itch in healthy persons and chronic itch patients. In our studies,...

Monkey see, monkey do: contagious itch in nonhuman primates.

"Contagious itch" has been anecdotally reported and recently confirmed in a controlled setting in humans. Here, we investigated in adult rhesus macaques whether 'contagious itch' occurs spontaneously in monkeys. In a first experiment, the latency to scratch following cage-mate scratching was observed in pair-housed adult rhesus macaques. Scratching increased within the first 60 s and subsequent...

Abstract Book of the Third National Congress on \"Cellular and Molecular News in Non-contagious Diseases\"