• Mark H Pitcher, Farid Tarum, Imran Z Rauf, Lucie A Low, and Catherine Bushnell.
• National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland. Electronic address: mark.pitcher@nih.gov.
• J Pain. 2017 Jun 1; 18 (6): 687-701.

AbstractAerobic exercise improves outcomes in a variety of chronic health conditions, yet the support for exercise-induced effects on chronic pain in humans is mixed. Although many rodent studies have examined the effects of exercise on persistent hypersensitivity, the most used forced exercise paradigms that are known to be highly stressful. Because stress can also produce analgesic effects, we studied how voluntary exercise, known to reduce stress in healthy subjects, alters hypersensitivity, stress, and swelling in a rat model of persistent hind paw inflammation. Our data indicate that voluntary exercise rapidly and effectively reduces hypersensitivity as well as stress-related outcomes without altering swelling. Moreover, the level of exercise is unrelated to the analgesic and stress-reducing effects, suggesting that even modest amounts of exercise may impart significant benefit in persistent inflammatory pain states.Published by Elsevier Inc.

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