Creating a Mouse Pain Model to Understand Chronic Human Pain
Our research focused on creating a rodent pain model that will allow us to further understand the neurobiology of chronic pain experienced by most humans. As it is right now, chronic pain is something that we don't quite understand as much as we would like to in the medical world. Typically, we use rodent models to understand the underlying mechanisms behind pain and to create pain treatments, but this system is not perfect. Since mice are unable to verbally communicate their pain sensations to researchers, it’s difficult for us to tell what level of pain the mouse is experiencing. This forces us to observe the mouse’s physical behaviors (spontaneous movements, evoked reflexes, or operant assays, a task that can be very labor-intensive, subjective, and highly experience dependent. In addition, for the existing pain models, it is often unclear which behavioral features best correlate with pain sensation (the specificity issue). Thus, we aim to create an automated, objective, and data-driven behavioral assay for rodent pain models with improved sensitivity and specificity.
Comments
This is so cool! Was there a…
This is so cool! Was there a specific reason why a hexagonal arena was decided upon?
Loved to See the Details of the Set-up
I truly enjoyed looking through your poster and understanding step by step how you created this arena. As a Neuroscience major I understand the importance of having such mouse models for understanding human behavior! What kind of stimulus will this arena allow you to apply for pain? How will you measure it?
This is an interesting…
This is an interesting approach to the problem you laid out. So is there only a way to measure the pain level of mice visually? Is there a way to cross-check the validity of results derived from your model with results from another measure of pain in mice?
Study of chronic pain
Interesting experiment! Having experience with research on mice surrounding the topic of chronic pain, I am looking forward to future studies done on understanding more about chronic pain suffered by mice and humans.
Loved learning about your research!
I'm curious to know how this will eventually apply to humans. How does observing the external reactions to pain by mice tell us more about the internal workings of the brain responding to pain in humans?
Cool project!
Your project sounds super cool! How are you applying chronic pain to the mice? I'm interested in how your research of pain in mice will translate eventually to treat chronic pain in humans.