• Ming-Gang Liu and Jun Chen.
• Institute for Biomedical Sciences of Pain and Institute for Functional Brain Disorders, Tangdu Hospital, The Fourth Military Medical University, Xi'an 710038, PR China; Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, College of Natural Sciences, Seoul National University, Seoul 151-746, South Korea.
• Prog. Neurobiol. 2014 May 1;116:13-32.

AbstractAffective disorders and cognitive deficits are common comorbidities of chronic pain in the clinical setting, which severely affect the quality of life of pain patients and impose a great difficulty upon clinical pain therapy. Despite large numbers of human studies examining this issue, there are surprisingly few reports investigating the comorbidities of chronic pain in animal models. This review summarizes and integrates previous reports of animal studies on pain and comorbidity, covering pain-evoked anxiety, depression, attentional deficits, cognitive impairment and locomotor dysfunction in rodents. Moreover, pain-induced alterations in synaptic plasticity are also discussed in terms of long-term potentiation and long-term depression, synaptic transmission, neuronal excitability and structural correlates in 'pain matrix'. Finally, we conclude this review by pointing out some unresolved problems and future research directions.Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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