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Scientists know that insects are feeling some pain since 2003, but a new study released today by Associate Professor Greg Neely and his colleagues at the University of Sydney proves for the first time that insects suffer also a chronic pain that lasts a long time after the healing of an initial injury.
The study in the peer-reviewed journal Progress of science offers the first genetic evidence of the cause of chronic pain in Drosophila (fruit flies) and there is good evidence that similar changes also cause chronic pain in humans. Ongoing research into these mechanisms could lead to the development of treatments that, for the first time, target the cause and not just the symptoms of chronic pain.
"If we can develop drugs or new stem cell therapies that can target and repair the underlying cause, instead of the symptoms, it could help a lot of people," said Associate Professor Neely, whose role is 39 team of researchers is studying pain at the Charles Perkins Center aiming to develop non-opiate solutions for the treatment of pain.
Pain and insects
"People do not really think that insects feel any pain," said Associate Professor Neely. "But it has already been shown in many invertebrate animals that they can detect and avoid dangerous stimuli that we perceive as painful." In non-humans, we call this sense "nociception", the meaning that detects potentially harmful stimuli like heat, cold, or physical injury, but for simplicity's sake we can talk about what insects feel like "pain". "
"So we knew that insects could feel the" pain ", but we did not know it, an injury could result in lasting hypersensitivity to normally painless stimuli, in the same way as the patient's experience."
What is chronic pain?
Chronic pain is defined as persistent pain that persists after healing from the initial injury. It comes in two forms: inflammatory pain and neuropathic pain.
The study of fruit flies focused on neuropathic "pain", which occurs after an injury to the nervous system and, in humans, is usually described as burning or throbbing pain. Neuropathic pain may occur in human conditions such as sciatica, pinched nerve, spinal cord injury, post-herpetic neuralgia (shingles), diabetic neuropathy, cancer bone pain and accidental injury.
Pain test in fruit flies
In this study, Associate Professor Neely and Dr. Thang Khuong, lead author of the University's Charles Perkins Center, damaged a nerve in one leg. The injury was then allowed to heal completely. Once the wound healed, they discovered that the other legs of the fly had become hypersensitive. "Once the animal has been injured once, it is hypersensitive and tries to protect itself for the rest of its life," said Associate Professor Neely. "It's pretty cool and intuitive."
Then the team genetically dissected exactly how it works.
"The fly receives" painful "messages from his body that then pass through sensory neurons to the ventral nerve cord, the version of our spinal cord by the fly.This nervous cord contains inhibitory neurons that act as a" portal "allowing perception of pain depending on the context, "said Associate Professor Neely. "After the injury, the injured nerve throws all its cargo into the nerve cord and kills all the brakes forever." Then the rest of the animal has no brakes on his "pain". threshold of "pain" changes and now they are hypervigilant ".
"Animals have to lose the" painful "brakes to survive in dangerous situations, but when humans lose those brakes, our lives are miserable, and we need to get those brakes back into a comfortable and pain free life."
In humans, chronic pain is thought to develop either through peripheral sensitization or central disinhibition, said Associate Professor Neely. "From our unbiased genomic dissection of neuropathic" pain "in the fly, all our data suggest that central disinhibition is the underlying and underlying cause of chronic neuropathic pain."
"It is important to note that now we know that the stage that causes neuropathic" pain "in flies, mice and probably humans, is the loss of pain brakes in the central nervous system. stop the pain for good. "
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