Journal
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 31, Issue 17, Pages 6317-6328Publisher
SOC NEUROSCIENCE
DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0076-11.2011
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Funding
- National Institutes of Health [NS36981, DA024044, DA01767]
- Craig Hospital
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Mechanical allodynia, the perception of innocuous tactile stimulation as painful, is a severe symptom of chronic pain often produced by damage to peripheral nerves. Allodynia affects millions of people and remains highly resistant to classic analgesics and therapies. Neural mechanisms for the development and maintenance of allodynia have been investigated in the spinal cord, brainstem, thalamus, and forebrain, but manipulations of these regions rarely produce lasting effects. We found that long-term alleviation of allodynic manifestations is produced by discreetly lesioning a newly discovered somatosensory representation in caudal granular insular cortex (CGIC) in the rat, either before or after a chronic constriction injury of the sciatic nerve. However, CGIC lesions alone have no effect on normal mechanical stimulus thresholds. In addition, using electrophysiological techniques, we reveal a corticospinal loop that could be the anatomical source of the influence of CGIC on allodynia.
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