Animal Models of Fibromyalgia

Fibromyalgia patients are suffering distressing pain-centered symptoms, and therefore the clarification of fibromyalgia pathophysiology and the development of more effective therapeutic options are urgent issues. In the preclinical phase of analgesic drug development, experimental animal pain models have been widely used to investigate analgesic efficacies of candidate agents. In this approach, some kind of manipulations are conducted to induce clinically relevant pain states such as hyperalgesia and allodynia in the experimental animal, and then, pain-associated behaviors are measured as indicators of pain. Efficacy of test drugs on the said pain is finally evaluated. While animal pain models associated with neuropathy or inflammation have been well established and used in drug discovery research (Negus et al., 2006), only a few have been developed for examining fibromyalgia. This chapter focuses on the review of putative animal models of fibromyalgia, which mimic some features of patients with fibromyalgia.