Noxious, but not innocuous, thermal stimuli evoke pERK expression in dorsal horn neurons after spared nerve injury in adult rats

Noxious stimulation of sensory afferents evokes phosphorylated extracellular signal regulated kinase (pERK) expression in spinal cord neurons. This study investigated the expression of pERK in the dorsal horn neurons in response to innocuous and noxious cold stimuli in naive versus spared nerve injury (SNI) rats. Noxious cold or hot stimuli (0 or 45 degrees C) elicited pERK expression in laminae I-II whereas cooling stimuli from 32 degrees C to 25,15 or 5 degrees C produced no or little pERK expression in dorsal horn neurons. Five days after SNI, a time when these animals showed heat hyperalgesia, cold and mechanical hypersensitivity, only noxious heat stimuli produced a significant increase in pERK expression compared to naive rats in spinal cord neurons. Thus, pERK cannot be used as an activity marker for neurons responding to cooling stimuli or cold allodynia; however, these results confirm the role of pERK as an activity marker for heat hyperalgesia. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.