Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a surgical treatment which has shown remarkable therapeutic benefits for patients with a variety of neurologic conditions. As an important application, it has been used to treat intractable pain for over 60 years. However, despite these clinical achievement, the precise action mechanisms underlying the effect of DBS still need to be fully explored. For the sake of deeply studying the neurological mechanisms, a feasible and well-designed animal model of the analgesia effect of DBS is needed. In this study, we selected VPL and PAG as the target brain area, which were widely used in clinical treatment of refractory pain, to investigate the analgesia effect caused by deep brain stimulation on two types animal model of pain. The chronic inflammatory pain is evoked by injection of CFA, while neuropathic pain is induced by SNL surgery. Some important results emerge from this study: (1) On the test of normal rats, we found that unilateral vlPAG stimulation with the frequency of 50 Hz can lead to significant increase of the thermal withdrawal threshold on bilateral hindpaws of rats, which means a significant bilateral analgesia effect. (2) On the test of chronic inflammatory pain, 50 Hz contralateral vlPAG stimulation significantly alleviated the thermal hyperalgesia observed at the sham stimulation group, showing analgesia effects to the CFA-induced inflammatory pain. Otherwise, 50 Hz and 2 Hz contralateral VPL stimulation exhibited the same effect. (3) On the test of neuropathic pain, the result showed that 50 Hz contralateral VPL stimulation significantly abolished the mechanical allodynia observed at the sham stimulation group, indicating remarkable analgesia effects to SNL-induced neuropathic pain.
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