Abstract
Behavioral models of cold responses are important tools for exploring the molecular mechanisms of cold sensation. To complement the currently cold behavioral assays and allow further studies of these mechanisms, we have developed a new technique to measure the cold response threshold, the cold plantar assay. In this assay, animals are acclimated on a glass plate and a cold stimulus is applied to the hindpaw through the glass using a pellet of compressed dry ice. The latency to withdrawal from the cooled glass is used as a measure of the cold response threshold of the rodents, and the dry ice pellet provides a ramping cold stimulus on the glass that allows the correlation of withdrawal latency values to rough estimates of the cold response threshold temperature. The assay is highly sensitive to manipulations including morphine-induced analgesia, Complete Freund's Adjuvant-induced inflammatory allodynia, and Spinal Nerve Ligation-induced neuropathic allodynia.
Highlights
In every field of medicine, pain is a significant issue [1,2]
One clinically important subset of pain is aberrant cold perception, which affects broad patient populations including multiple sclerosis [3], chemotherapy [4,5,6], and stroke patients [7,8]. These patients experience alterations in cold sensitivity that profoundly impact their quality of life, including alterations of the cold response threshold and of the severity of the evoked sensation[3,7,9,10]
The latency to withdrawal from the cooled glass is used as a surrogate for the temperature at which the mice responded to the cold stimulus
Summary
One clinically important subset of pain is aberrant cold perception, which affects broad patient populations including multiple sclerosis [3], chemotherapy [4,5,6], and stroke patients [7,8]. These patients experience alterations in cold sensitivity that profoundly impact their quality of life, including alterations of the cold response threshold (cold allodynia) and of the severity of the evoked sensation (cold hyperalgesia)[3,7,9,10]. Progress in understanding these mechanisms has been slowed by limitations in the behavioral assays used to study animal models of aberrant cold perception, suggesting that new, complementary assays are necessary
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