For decades, histological assessments were the only end-point in stroke research, typically using lesion size determination to evaluate the potential therapeutic effectiveness of an agent in in vivo stroke models. While this approach is indeed valid, failures in developing effect ...

Many investigators have examined or are examining the effects of focal and global cerebral ischemia on brain physiology, chemistry, and molecular aspects and function. Many animal and cellular models are utilized for these types of studies. However, anesthetics must be used for the in vivo s ...

Non-invasive imaging technologies play a substantial role in the evaluation of physiological and pathophysiological processes. They are indispensable in biomedical research and in the clinic. In the past decade, designated small animal imaging scanners have become available f ...

Acute brain damage after stroke produces remarkable changes in the brain that can be visualized with a variety of neuroimaging techniques. Some of these techniques are used in patients for diagnostic purposes and are now available to image the rodent brain. However, noninvasive imaging of t ...

The incidence of cancer pain is high in patients with advanced disease as well as in patients undergoing active treatment for solid tumors. Further, modern cancer therapies have significantly increased survival rates, making effective pain control critical as unrelieved pain signi ...

Central neuropathic pain is triggered by trauma, neurological disease, or infection of the central nervous system. A number of powerful models of central pain produce consistent phenotypes of behavioral hypersensitivity and provide an understanding into the mechanisms underl ...

In this chapter, we describe a newly developed rodent model of chemogenic pain involving the inflammation of one or two lumbar sensory ganglia using the immune activator, zymosan. Using this model, we have investigated cellular, molecular, and ionic mechanisms of inflammatory responses ...

Injury to dorsal root ganglion and/or the dorsal roots can lead to neuropathic pain. This chapter provides an overview of animal models that mimic ganglion compression by the implantation of a metal rod in the lumbar intervertebral foramen (CCD model) and dorsal root injury by loose ligation of t ...

Chronic pain can originate from injury or dysfunction in the peripheral nervous system, and currently available therapeutic methods are often ineffective. Despite the clinical significance, the mechanisms underlying the development and maintenance of chronic pain after per ...

The study of visceral pain is of high clinical relevance and the findings more directly translational in the search for analgesic agents. Early studies of nerve recordings after acute visceral nerve activation with (1) mechanical distension of hollow organs such as the colon or esophagus, (2) ...

Animal models of inflammatory pain have been widely used to study the mechanisms of tissue injury-induced persistent pain. A variety of inflammatory agents or irritants, including complete Freund’s adjuvant, carrageenan, zymosan, mustard oil, formalin, capsaicin, bee venom, acid ...

The assessment of pain is of critical importance for mechanistic studies as well as for the validation of drug targets. The study of pain in awake animals raises ethical, philosophical, and technical problems. Philosophically, there is the problem that pain cannot be monitored directly in an ...

Postoperative pain control remains difficult because the current treatments have limited efficacy; many patients experience moderate to severe pain after a variety of surgeries. Recognizing the gap between preclinical models of persistent pain and postsurgical pain, we and oth ...

Painful distal sensory neuropathy is the most common neurological complication of HIV1 infection. There are several neuropathic pain syndromes associated with the disease; however, the most common is a sensory neuropathy called HIV sensory neuropathy (HIV-SN). HIV-SN can be subdiv ...

Pain is frequently the earliest and most problematic syndrome of distal peripheral neuropathy (DPN) in diabetic patients. The variety of time of onset, duration and progression, modalities, and severity of individual presentations of painful DPN makes classification and evaluat ...

The basic principles underlying field potential generation and the application of current source density (CSD) analysis are outlined in this chapter. Currents in the brain are mainly derived from synaptic or action currents flowing in a closed loop, traversing both intracellular and e ...

The single-cell juxtacellular recording–labeling technique makes it possible to label the neuron recorded extracellularly. It is a very useful tool for achieving single-cell structure–function correlation studies in living, intact neural networks and for determining their ...

Current source density (CSD) is the second spatial derivative of the local field potential (LFP). CSD analysis has been used extensively to localize the pattern of transmembrane current flow in neuronal ensembles. For brain responses to repeated external stimulation, the LFP data are epo ...

Digital telemetry (DT) offers a method of collecting the electrical signals produced by neural activity and transmitting them wirelessly to a receiver/decoder for analysis and storage. The wirelessness means that activity can be recorded from a subject that is behaving relatively no ...

One of the fundamental goals in neuroscience is to uncover, in real-time, the formation and retrieval of the brain’s associative memory traces. Here, we describe methodology we have developed to permit large-scale recording and analysis of neuronal activity from ensembles of neurons. We ha ...