Acute Pain: The Definition Of Pain

IASP’s definition of pain is “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage or described in terms of such damage” (H. Merskey and N. Bogduk 1994). Pain however is much broader and can be further classified by its duration or pathophysiology. Most commonly pain can be classified as acute or chronic. Acute pain is a essential warning sign that helps the host protect itself from a potentially dangerous environment. The unset of acute pain is sudden and it usually accompanied by tissue damage and inflammation. The duration of acute pain is anything that last less than 3 months and subsides when the injury is healed.

Chronic pain is long lasting and does not go away when the tissue injury is healed. It has the possibility of even spreading beyond the original site of the injury. The underlying mechanism is not very well understood. It is essential to understand normal pain processing in order to understand the pathology in more detail. Normal pain processing involves receptors, nerve fibers and action potentials which help to carry the pain stimuli’s from the site of injury, up the afferent nerve, to the dorsal root ganglion which then relays the stimulus to the brain (Benoliel et al, 2012).

There are 4 steps that make up the mechanisms of pain and they include transduction, transmission, modulation and perception. The pain originates in the periphery at the receptors in the end of nerves and can be in the form of heat, cold, mechanical or even chemical pain. The first step is transduction which is when the external stimuli are converted into an electrical impulse in the form of an action potential. Next there is a transmission of the action potential through the afferent neurons to t...

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...as able to remain on the Rotarod was then recorded and compared to baseline, which has been shown to be an effective method for testing motor coordination (Bohlen et al, 2009). To further test the drug’s effect on the rat’s sensory motor coordination the rats were put through an open field test. This was done through using an ANY-maze y shape platform and the number of times the rat reached the center of the maze was recorded

Although the results have not yet been published, the expected finding of the research was that topical medications can reduce neuropathic orofacial pain. In addition, it was expected that the topical medication would show significantly less side effects when compared to systemic medications. The results of this study could propose a new mechanism of action to treat neuropathic orofacial pain which would have significant clinical relevance.