I'm trying to determine pain levels in mice (not allodynia or hyperalgesia, but regular pain).
As pain is rather subjective, it is hard to quantify, especially in rodents. What are the most common and most well supported methods for quantifying pain?
I've seen the "grimace scale", which may work, but I thought about asking on RG first.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306452211014382
Hi Jeremy,
You can do it indirectly, by using a comparison of ECG and/or pulse and/or BP recordings at different time points.
Good luck,
Arkady
We can't even measure pain well in humans, so trying to do it with rodents is even more challenging. Things like the Von Frey test for allodynia and the plantar test for thermal hyperalgesia are very standard. These tests measure reflexive responses to acute pain and can be used to show changes in response to painful events. These are very prevalent in the field as they are very, very easy to do. However, they do not necessarily correlate well with clinical data. Operant models of pain testing are a good alternative and often more closely related to clinical data. Similarly to asking people to rate their own pain, it is possible to "ask" the rodents how much pain they are in by putting them through a reward/conflict assay. This gives a baseline of "pain" that can be manipulated by analgesics, capsaicin, neuropathic pain states, etc. Below is a few articles from my graduate studies lab that discusses these studies including one on mice. Let me know if you have any additional questions. Good luck!
Article Use of the Operant Orofacial Pain Assessment Device (OPAD) t...
Article Anti-nociceptive effect of a conjugate of substance P and li...
Article The Effects of a Co-Application of Menthol and Capsaicin on ...
The test depends on the "type" of nociception you are trying to assess, induced or spontaneous. Reflexive induced pain models including hot plate, tail flick, paw flick, etc are not likely to have significant validity (i.e. little transferability to humans). For spontaneous models, I have attached a good example of a conditioned place preference model that may be more applicable to human transfer.
Dorsal Root Ganglionic Field Stimulation Relieves Spontaneous and Induced Neuropathic Pain in Rats.
Pan B, Yu H, Fischer GJ, Kramer JM, Hogan QH.
J Pain. 2016 Dec;17(12):1349-1358. doi: 10.1016/j.jpain.2016.09.004.
PMID:
27687223
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27687223
It depend on the pain. In case of the arthritic pain use computerized analysis of audible and ultrasonic vocalizations (J Neurosci Methods 2005, 141(2):261-9). Otherwise refer to M.Barrot’s review (Neuroscience 2012, 211: 39-50).
There are different test in rodents. They represent types of pain that humans suffer, but the results can not be extrapolated directly to humans. Examples: formalin test in rat or mouse is inflammatory pain. abdominal writhing is visceral pain, PIFIR test is arthritic pain, Randall Selitto is mechanic and inflammatory pain. They are validated and are reported in many papers. Good Luck!
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