BioProject

Inflammation plays a role in neuropathic pain conditions as well as in pain induced solely by an inflammatory stimulus. More...

Inflammation plays a role in neuropathic pain conditions as well as in pain induced solely by an inflammatory stimulus. Robust mechanical hyperalgesia and allodynia can be induced by locally inflaming the L5 dorsal root ganglion (DRG) in rat. This model allows investigation of the contribution of inflammation per se to chronic pain conditions. Most previous microarray studies of DRG gene expression have investigated neuropathic pain models involving axon transection. To examine the role of inflammation, we used microarray methods to examine gene expression 3 days after local inflammation of the L5 DRG in rat. We observed significant regulation in a large number of genes (23% of observed transcripts), and examined 221 (3%) with a fold-change of 1.5-fold or more in more detail. Immune-related genes were the largest category in this group and included members of the complement system as well as several pro-inflammatory cytokines. However, these upregulated cytokines had no prior links to peripheral pain in the literature other than through microarray studies, though most had previously described roles in CNS (especially neuroinflammatory conditions) as well as in immune responses. Overall design: The L5 dorsal root ganglion (DRG) was locally inflamed with zymosan/Incomplete Freund's Adjuvant. DRG were isolated 3 days later. Each sample was RNA extracted from a single DRG. 6 samples from rats with local DRG inflammation were compared with 6 samples from sham-operated rats. Less...