Major spinal surgery is associated with severe postoperative pain and stress response, bowel dysfunction, and a potential for chronic pain development. Epidural analgesia has been shown to be advantageous compared to intravenous analgesia alone. The aim of the study was to investigate whether postoperative addition of epidural levobupivacaine to intravenous opioid analgesia offers advantage ove...

BACKGROUND Despite decades of intense research efforts, actions of acute opioids are not fully understood. Increasing evidence suggests that in addition to well-documented antinociceptive effects opioids also produce paradoxical hyperalgesic and excitatory effects on neurons. However, most studies focus on the pronociceptive actions of chronic opioid exposure. Matrix metalloproteinase 9 (MMP-9)...

This report describes the diagnosis and management of repetitive stress-related injury (RSRI) of the proximal metacarpus in a seven-year old Thoroughbred racehorse. Intra-articular analgesia of the middle carpal joint (MCJ) as well as perineural analgesia of the lateral palmar nerve (LPN) abolished lameness and a diagnosis of RSRI of the proximopalmar metacarpus was made after nuclear scintigra...

Fentanyl citrate analgesia attenuates the excess nitrogen excretion in the urine and glucose production induced by trauma. On the other hand, intracerebroventricular injection of morphine stimulates excretion of stress hormones, such as catecholamines and corticosterone. Furthermore, morphine levels in the brain are increased during fasting and sepsis. The aims of this study were to determine w...

  Tolerance and dependence are two main problems that have limited morphine administration as an analgesic drug and they might be as a result of changes in the number and affinity of receptors, dysfunction of adenylate cyclase, impaired coupling between activated µ receptor and K+ channels, and changes in the K+ and Ca2+ channels. There are several reports concerning the role of some of these...

Animals eat rather than react to moderate pain. Here, we examined the behavioral, hedonic, and neural requirements for ingestion analgesia in ad libitum fed rats. Noxious heat-evoked withdrawals were similarly suppressed during self-initiated chocolate eating and ingestion of intraorally infused water, sucrose, or saccharin, demonstrating that ingestion analgesia does not require feeding motiva...

  There is evidence that sweeteners such as sucrose and saccharin interact with endogenous opioid systems. Further research has shown that feeding different concentrations of sucrose and saccharin alter latency in the tail-flick test. In this study, the influence of a 12-day regimen of different sweetening agents, sucrose (32%), saccharin (0.08%) and aspartame (0.16%) on morphine-induced analge...

Endogenous carbon monoxide (CO), which is produced by the enzyme heme oxygenase (HO), participates as a neuromodulator in physiological processes such as thermoregulation and nociception by stimulating the formation of 3',5'-cyclic guanosine monophosphate (cGMP). In particular, the acute physical restraint-induced fever of rats can be blocked by inhibiting the enzyme HO. A previous study report...

This work was designed to examine whether brain endomorphins (EM1 and EM2), the endogenous m-opioid ligands, are involved in electroacupuncture (EA)-induced analgesia in the mice. C57BL/6J mice were given EA for 30 min and the effect of EA-induced analgesia was assessed by radiant heat tail ̄ick latency (TFL). Intracerebroventricular (i.c.v.) injection of m-opioid receptor antagonist D-Phe-Cys-...

Pain sensitivity in 52 college male and female athletes and non-athletes was assessed at baseline and then after exercise and competition while workload was held constant. Subjects pedaled on a stationary bike for 20 minutes at 60% maximum capacity in both exercise and competition conditions. Non-exercising, repeated-pain testing controls were tested at the same time intervals. Pain sensitivity...