The assessment and management of pain in humans and animals has generated unprecedented discussion in the last 20 years. In the veterinary field, heightened awareness to pain has prompted several professional organizations to make formal position statements, which unequivocally mandate pain relief (McMillan, 2003). Regulatory bodies primarily concerned with the use of animals in biomedical rese...

OBJECTIVE Neuropathic pain causes patients feel indescribable pain. Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) is one of the treatment methods in neuropathic pain but the action mechanism is still unclear. To study the effect and mechanism of analgesic effects from DBS in neuropathic pain and to enhance the analgesic effect of DBS, we stimulated the ventral posterolateral nucleus (VPL) in rats. METHODS To ...

Recent human and animal studies provide growing evidence that vagal nerve stimulation (VNS) can deliver strong analgesic effects in addition to providing therapeutic efficacy in the treatment of refractory epilepsy and depression. Analgesia is potentially mediated by vagal afferents that inhibit spinal nociceptive reflexes and transmission and have strong anti-inflammatory properties. The purpo...

Scientists who perform major survival surgery on laboratory animals face a dual welfare and methodological challenge: how to choose surgical anesthetics and post-operative analgesics that will best control animal suffering, knowing that both pain and the drugs that manage pain can all affect research outcomes. Scientists who publish full descriptions of animal procedures allow critical and syst...

Despite efforts to eliminate the use of animals in testing and the availability of many accepted alternative methods, animals are still widely used for toxicological research and testing. While research using in vitro and computational models has dramatically increased in recent years, such efforts have not yet measurably impacted animal use for regulatory testing and are not likely to do so fo...

OBJECTIVE It has been hypothesized that serotonin reuptake inhibitor antidepressants (ADs) are only weakly antinociceptive but augment noradrenergic (NA) antinociception. Thus, ADs with combined serotonergic (SN) and NA activity, (i.e., the serotonergic/noradrenergic (SN/NA) ADs) should have greater antinociceptive activity versus the NA ADs, which in turn should have more antinociceptive activ...

Intracranial lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV) infection is a widely used animal model to study virus-induced cytotoxic T cell (CTL) mediated meningitis and immunopathology. Nevertheless, this model causes severe pain and distress in mice, especially at later stages of the disease. Therefore, new treatment regimens to improve animal welfare have to be developed. In this study, we subcut...

background and objective: considering the wide side effects of synthetic pain killers, use of herbal drugs in folk medicine as analgesic agents has increased. in the present work, we tried to uncover the pharmacological potential of ethanolic extracts by using various animal models and also to explore the potent antinociceptive effect of the plant thymus kotschyanus. materials and methods: the ...

Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease (CMT) is the most common inherited motor and sensory neuropathy. Previous studies have found that, according to CMT patients, neuropathic pain is an occasional symptom of CMT. However, neuropathic pain is not considered to be a significant symptom associated with CMT and, as a result, no studies have investigated the pathophysiology underlying neuropathic pain in thi...

Many common cancers have a propensity to metastasize to bone. Although malignancies often go undetected in their native tissues, bone metastases produce excruciating pain that severely compromises patient quality of life. Cancer-induced bone pain (CIBP) is poorly managed with existing medications, and its multifaceted etiology remains to be fully elucidated. Novel analgesic targets arise as mor...