Defensive behaviors of lower mammals constitute a significant model for understanding human emotional disorders. They generally occur in response to a number of threatening stimuli, including predators, attacking conspecifics, and dangerous objects or situations. Such beh ...

Existing assays monitoring ENPP1 activity are either not physiologically relevant or not suitable for high-throughput screening (HTS). Here, we describe the development and implementation of two new ENPP1 activity assays that address these drawbacks. These assays employ physi ...

Migraine is a high prevalence disorder which affects a significant proportion of the general population, especially women during their central and more productive time of the life, thus causing severe disability. The genetic basis of the disease is unknown and the mechanism is poorly unde ...

Pain is one of the most common reasons for which patients seek dental and medical care. Orofacial pain conditions consist of a wide range of disorders including odontalgia (toothache), temporomandibular disorders, trigeminal neuralgia and others. Most of these conditions are either i ...

Pain-depressed behavior can be defined as any behavior that decreases in rate, frequency, duration, or intensity in response to a putative pain state. Common examples include pain-related decreases in feeding, locomotion and expression of positively reinforced operant behavior. In ...

Creating a robust and unbiased assay for the study of current and novel analgesics has been a daunting task. Traditional rodent models of pain and inflammation typically rely on a negative reaction to various forms of evoked stimuli to elicit a pain response and are subject to rater interpretati ...

The conventional methods for the study of thermal pain in animals apply constant suprathreshold heat stimuli and measure the reflex latency of pain-avoiding reactions. The latency measured by these methods may greatly vary upon repeated measurements which is a major disadvantage con ...

To facilitate the study of pain transmission and the characterization of novel analgesic compounds, an array of experimental animal pain models has been developed mainly in rodents. In these preclinical models, nociceptive pain can be measured by both spontaneous and evoked behaviors. ...

Animal models of tissue injury have been used to investigate the mechanisms of pain. Here, we describe a variety of animal models that have been used to mimic acute surgical pain in human subjects, which include the plantar, tail, and gastrocnemius incision models. We also provide discussion on ani ...

This chapter seeks to provide a concise overview of the pharmacologic armamentarium available to treat pain. Drugs will be discussed in terms of their indications, mechanisms of action, and major side effects. For the purposes of this chapter, analgesics will be divided into two groups: curre ...

With the dawn of the twenty-first Century, imaging has assumed a new role in disease-oriented science. Regarding pain, the emphasis clearly turned from structural to functional imaging with functional molecular imaging assuming the leading edge. This trend parallels the efforts of bio ...

Performing genetic studies in model organisms is a powerful approach for investigating the mechanisms of volatile anesthetic action. Striking similarities between the results observed in Caenorhabditis elegans and in other organisms suggest that many of the conclusions can be g ...

Several recent techniques have allowed us to pinpoint the receptors responsible for the detection of nociceptive stimuli. Among these receptors, ion channels play a fundamental role in the recognition and transduction of stimuli that can cause pain. During the last decade, compelling e ...

Ion channels are membrane proteins that gate the flow of ions into and out of a cell. They are present in the membranes of human, animal, plant, and bacterial cells. They are profoundly involved in diverse tasks ranging from neuronal functions to hormonal secretion and cell division. Biophysical ch ...

G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) constitute the single largest family of target proteins for drugs of pain and anesthesia. Non-invasive assays based on the activity of G protein-based sensors in living cells allow the identification of potentially novel compounds for anesthesia ...

The modern version of the Dental Impaction Pain Model (DIPM) was developed in the mid-1970s. Since that time, several hundred studies have been conducted by numerous investigators. Today it is arguably the most utilized of all the acute pain models. Its popularity is due to the success rate of the stud ...

The heat/capsaicin sensitization and intradermal capsaicin injection models are safe and noninvasive paradigms to generate stable, long-lasting, and reproducible injury capable of producing an area of both primary and secondary hyperalgesia. Risk of skin injury is substanti ...

The cold pressor test is a reliable pain model in which subjects submerge their hands and forearms into ice water while onset to pain, pain intensity, and tolerance are assessed. Although originally developed as a model for hypertension, the paradigm leads to development of reproducible pain r ...

The UV-B pain model utilizes ultraviolet light to induce a small area of inflammation allowing assessment of mechanical and thermal thresholds. Pharmacologic testing has mainly focused on reduction of primary hyperalgesia, although the effect of analgesics on secondary hyperal ...

Neuropathic pain is defined by International Association for the Study of Pain as “pain initiated or caused by a primary lesion or dysfunction in the nervous system which can persist long after the initial injury has healed”. Given the complexity of neuropathic pain (“lesion or dysfunction” en ...