relieve pain. drugs that block a receptor on microglia can help relieve chronic pain.
most pain is a result -up call danger, designed to ensure that your hand does not linger over a hot stove, for example. But the endless pain is just pain and some people suffer for no obvious reason. New results show that the source of this chronic pain could be in a previously neglected cell type and may one day lead to the successful treatment of long-term scourge.
Sometimes the pain caused by injury, such as a pinched nerve, persists even after the injury has healed. This mysterious, often debilitating, pain doctors and scientists puzzled. Most have focused on the communication between nerve cells. Some evidence suggested that another type of cell could be involved. These functions called microglia immune cells of the nervous system, repair damaged nerves and remove dead tissue.
The new study involves microglia and identifies a particular receptor on cells that appears to play a crucial role in chronic pain. Neurochemist Kazuhide Inoue of the National Institute of Health Sciences in Tokyo and his colleagues simulate pathological pain in rats by cutting a sensory nerve, which caused the wounded animal back to even a light touch. The researchers then injected a compound in the spinal cord of rats that interfere with molecules known as P2X receptors, which sit in the cell membrane and control the ion flux in the cell. Of the seven types of P2X receptors, both occur in neurons of the pain-sensing. specifically blocking these receptors do not relieve the sensitivity of rats to touch. Blocking every seven, however, eased the pain. Another receptor, called P2X 4 , only found on microglia, and when researchers found that microglia gathered in the spinal cord, especially on the side where the damaged nerve joins the cord, they suspected that P2X 4 might be involved. To test this, they injected the cells directly into the spinal cord of healthy rats. These rats soon started as well as the injured rats.
"In much of the world of pain, this is a powerful statement that you can not ignore glia," says the researcher Edwin McCleskey pain of the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. The results raise the question, McCleskey added, how microglia detect nerve damage. The answers to that and other questions could help lead to therapies for devastating chronic pain.
Related Sites
The site McCleskey
Information about chronic pain of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke
0 Komentar