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Spinal processing of bee venom-induced pain and hyperalgesia

Jun CHEN

Institute for Biomedical Sciences of Pain and Institute for Functional Brain Disorders, Tangdu Hospital, the Fourth Military Medical University, Xi’an 710038, China

Abstract

Subcutaneous injection of bee venom causes long-term neural activation and hypersensitization in the dorsal horn of thespinal cord, which contributes to the development and maintenance of various pain-related behaviors. The unique behavioral ‘phenotypes’of nociception and hypersensitivity identified in the rodent bee venom test are believed to reflect a complex pathological stateof inflammatory pain and might be appropriate to the study of phenotype-based mechanisms of pain and hyperalgesia. In this review,the spinal processing of the bee venom-induced different ‘phenotypes’ of pain and hyperalgesia will be described. The accumulativeelectrophysiological, pharmacological, and behavioral data strongly suggest that different ‘phenotypes’ of pain and hyperalgesia aremediated by different spinal signaling pathways. Unraveling the phenotype-based mechanisms of pain might be useful in developmentof novel therapeutic drugs against complex clinic pathological pain.

Key words: spinal cord dorsal horn; signaling pathway; persistent spontaneous pain; hypera lgesia; allodynia; bee venom model

Received: 　　Accepted:

Corresponding author: Jun CHEN　　E-mail: junchen@fmmu.edu.cn

Citing This Article：

Jun CHEN. Spinal processing of bee venom-induced pain and hyperalgesia. Acta Physiol Sin 2008; 60 (5): 645-652 (in Chinese with English abstract).