• Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. · Jan 1986

    Review

    Range of environmental stimuli producing nociceptive suppression: implications for neural mechanisms.

    • R L Hayes and Y Katayama.
    • Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 1986 Jan 1;467:1-13.

    AbstractInitial studies of environmentally induced analgesia in the rat established several important characteristics of this phenomenon. We demonstrated that stressful environmental stimuli were not sufficient to produce nociceptive suppression. However, emphasis by many researchers on stress-related analgesia has limited studies of the range of environmental contexts producing nociceptive suppression and handicapped efforts to describe neural mechanisms mediating EIA. Another feature of EIA was the observation that the nervous system might contain multiple opiate and non-opiate systems capable of modulating nociceptive responses. Although previous research had recognized the possibility of endogenous opiate analgesic systems, little attention had been given to non-opiate analgesic mechanisms. Since it seems unlikely that multiple systems would serve purely redundant roles, it seemed reasonable to speculate that at least some of these systems may mediate other modulatory functions in addition to regulating sensory information on noxious stimuli. The observation that some environmental conditions could increase nociceptive responses certainly indicated that environmentally induced nociceptive modulation was not restricted to analgesia. These and other observations lead us to suspect that neural mechanisms mediating at least some forms of EIA could be related to mechanisms mediating more general modulating processes associated with selective attention, orienting, or arousal. Subsequent studies in the primate established that changes in vigilance demands, stimulus relevance, and stimulus predictability could modulate responses of medullary dorsal horn nociceptors coding sensory-discriminative information on noxious thermal stimuli. However, these studies provided no information on the neural mechanisms mediating this modulation. Later studies in cats described an endogenous, non-narcotic analgesic system representing a subcomponent of a larger cholinergic system principally involved in regulating animals' responsiveness to external stimuli. Research also indicated that this cholinergic analgesic system could function physiologically to modulate nociceptive responsiveness in the presence of certain environmental stimuli but not others. Considered together, data from these studies indicate that, while stress is not sufficient to produce analgesia, a variety of environmental conditions can modulate nociceptive input. A number of different neural systems could contribute EIA associated with various stimuli. It is possible that the regulation of nociceptive input is not the exclusive, or even principal, consequence of normal activity within certain of these systems.

      Pubmed     Full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…

What will the 'Medical Journal of You' look like?

Start your free 21 day trial now.

We guarantee your privacy. Your email address will not be shared.