An Update on Neuropathic Pain Models

An rodent animal model of pain offers a powerful tool in order to understand the mechanism involved in peripheral nerve injury for preclinical study of pain. A battery of neuropathic pain models has been developed to simulate the clinical pain conditions with diverse etiology. This article reviews some of the most widely used or promising new models for chronic pain. Partial spinal ligation, chronic constriction injury, and L5/l6 spinal nerve ligation represent three of the best-characterized rodent models of peripheral neuropathy. For reasons of reproducibility and simplicity, most studies of neuropathic pain are based upon animal models of traumatic nerve injury, usually in the rat sciatic nerve. The present review exhaustively discusses the methodology, behavioral alterations of different animal models of neuropathic pain along with their modifications. Development of these models has contributed immensely in understanding the chronic pain and underlying peripheral as well as central pathogenic