Abstract
Neuropathic pain (NP) is pain caused by somatosensory nervous system injury or disease. Its prominent symptoms are spontaneous pain, hyperalgesia, and allodynia, and the sense of pain is extremely strong. Owing to the complex mechanism, conventional painkillers lack effectiveness. Recently, research on the treatment of NP by stem cells is increasing and promising results have been achieved in preclinical research. In this review, we briefly introduce the neuropathic pain, the current treatment strategy, and the development of stem cell therapy, and we collected the experimental and clinical trial articles of many kinds of stem cells in the treatment of neuropathic pain from the past ten years. We analyzed and summarized the general efficacy and mechanism of stem cells in the treatment of neuropathic pain. We found that the multiple-mechanism approach was different from the single mechanism of routine clinical drugs; stem cells play a role in peripheral mechanism, central mechanism, and disinhibition of spinal cord level that lead to neuropathic pain, so they are more effective in analgesia and treatment of neuropathic pain.
Highlights
Pain is the body’s response to external injury or internal disease
In the study by Mert et al, adipose stem cell therapy significantly decreased the levels of proinflammatory factors such as IL-1 β and IL6 induced by the chronic constriction nerve injury model (CCI) in the sciatic nerve and increased anti-inflammatory factor IL-10 [31]
Chen et al found that the immunoreactivity (IR) of Activating transcription factor 3 (ATF3) in L4-L5 dorsal root ganglion (DRG) neurons significantly increased by 40% in the CCI model
Summary
Pain is the body’s response to external injury or internal disease. Normal pain is essential to an individual’s risk perception and hazard avoidance [1]. Neuropathic pain (NP) is pain caused by injury or disease of the somatosensory nervous system [6, 7], which accounts for 20 to 25% of patients with chronic pain; its prevalence rate in the general population may be as high as 7 to 8% [8]. Neuropathic pain is defined as pain caused by damage or disease of the somatosensory nervous system [9, 10]. This kind of pain is usually observed in the innervated area of the body with a damaged nervous system structure (projection pain) [2]. We look forward to the development of more nonoperative diagnostic techniques for the exact detection of NP in the future
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