Abstract
During ingestion of water, chocolate, sucrose, and saccharin, pain-related behaviors are suppressed. This ingestion analgesic effect is reversed when the hedonic valence of a food is switched from "good" to "bad" as occurs during conditioned taste aversion. Here, we tested the converse hedonic shift to determine if ingestion analgesia occurs when 0.3 M NaCl is made palatable by inducing a sodium appetite. In Experiment 1, sham- and sodium-depleted rats were tested for paw withdrawal and lick latencies to brief noxious heat during quiet wake and intraoral NaCl ingestion. Only sodium-depleted rats showed a suppression of heat-evoked reactions during NaCl ingestion. In Experiment 2, we tested whether this analgesic effect is mediated by the brainstem nucleus raphe magnus (NRM). Inactivation of NRM with muscimol blocked ingestion analgesia during NaCl ingestion by sodium-depleted rats. This attenuation was not due to a hyperalgesic effect of NRM inactivation. Muscimol microinjections into a nearby region, the nucleus raphe obscurus (NRO), were ineffective. The present findings demonstrate that the internal milieu of an animal can modify ingestion analgesia, and that the analgesia during NaCl ingestion by sodium hungry rats is mediated by NRM.
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