Neuropathic pain caused by injury to the nervous system is a difficult clinical problem and a large proportion of patients experience no or only partial relief from existing treatments. Pain sensitivity and the development of neuropathic pain are complex biological and physiological entities that are known to be affected by genetics and sex. Although many theories have been put forward to expla...

BACKGROUND The incidence of tuberculosis is high in Africa. It is treated with medications that can trigger neuropathic pain and thus negatively affect patients' quality of life and treatment compliance. The aim of this study was to investigate neuropathic pain due to antituberculosis drugs in patients without HIV infection. METHODS This prospective study, conducted in the pulmonology departm...

One of the most challenging clinical issues the dentist confronts is the patient with persistent orofacial pain without obvious proximate physical cause. Patients with persistent pain often seek consultation from many clinicians and undergo multiple unnecessary procedures before receiving a correct diagnosis and appropriate treatment. Clinicians unfamiliar with neuropathic pain may become frust...

The redefinition of neuropathic pain as "pain arising as a direct consequence of a lesion or disease affecting the somatosensory system," which was suggested by the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) Special Interest Group on Neuropathic Pain (NeuPSIG) in 2008, has been widely accepted. In contrast, the proposed grading system of possible, probable, and definite neuropathic ...

S the earliest descriptions of pain related to injury of the nervous system, it has been recognized that the characteristics of this type of pain differ markedly from those of pain due to nonneural tissue damage. Later, as new analgesics were developed, it became clear that neurogenic pain was very often refractory to these drugs. This brief article considers some historical aspects of the deve...

Over the last 10 years, the diagnosis small fiber neuropathy (SFN) has gained recognition worldwide. Patients often suffer from severe neuropathic pain that may be difficult to treat. A substantial subset of patients with SFN is aged 65 years or older, and these patients often exhibit comorbidities and usage of multiple drugs, making neuropathic pain treatment more challenging. In this review, ...

Radiation-induced neuropathic pain is a rare but devastating complication following cancer treatment. It is often progressive, refractory to conservative treatment, and sometimes irreversible. The exact mechanism of radiation-induced neuropathic pain is unknown, but it is associated with perineural fibrosis, atrophy, and ischemia. Systemic administration of local anesthetics is known to be effe...

BACKGROUND Best current estimates of neuropathic pain (NeuP) prevalence come from studies using various screening detecting pain with probable neuropathic features; the proportion experiencing significant, long-term NeuP, and the proportion not responding to standard treatment are unknown. These "refractory" cases are the most clinically important to detect, being the most severe, requiring spe...

Effective treatment for neuropathic pain is still lacking, because of poor understanding of pathological mechanisms at the molecular level. Chronic pain (inflammatory and neuropathic pain) is believed to be caused by aberrant neuronal responses along the pain transmission pathways. Both peripheral and central origins are likely to be involved in chronic pain, although their contribution may be ...

Two voltage gated sodium channel alpha-subunits, Nav1.7 and Nav1.8, are expressed at high levels in nociceptor terminals and have been implicated in the development of inflammatory pain. Mis-expression of voltage-gated sodium channels by damaged sensory neurons has also been implicated in the development of neuropathic pain, but the role of Nav1.7 and Nav1.8 is uncertain. Here we show that dele...