Animal models and pain

Question 1

Reference

Answer 1

Odd-Geir Berge, 2011

Question 2

What are the main challenges in modelling chronic pain?

Answer 2

1. Pain contains sensory-discriminative, affective-motivational, and cognitive components. It is difficult, if not impossible, to recreate all of these influences in animal models.
2. Interpreting animal behaviours in terms of sensory modalities and affective connotations is complex and sometimes erroneous.
3. Chronic pain - even for the same aitiologies - is highly heterogeneous. The aitological and anatomical criteria used to characterise pain syndromes is often of little use to understanding the factors that contribute to an individuals pain.

Question 3

What implications may the heterogenetity of pain have for the predictive validity of animal models.

Answer 3

Animal models may have predictive validity, but not in the traditional sense.
They may not be predictive of repsonse to an analgesic treatment across a broad diagnostic category such as ‘neuropathic pain’.
Single models are likely to reflect a subset of mechanisms (or at best, a subset of patients) that can be targeted by the analgesic. The model would therefore be predictive of patients response within whom those underlying modelled mechanisms are contributing to the chronic pain condition.

Question 4

Finish off

Answer 4

https://bpspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1476-5381.2011.01300.x