Physiology & behavior
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Physiology & behavior · Jul 2018
Anxiety- but not depressive-like behaviors are related to facial hyperalgesia in a model of trigeminal neuropathic pain in rats.
Trigeminal neuralgia (TN) is a painful condition characterized by excruciating facial pain, which has a serious impact on quality of life. Depression and anxiety have been commonly associated with TN, but clinical studies report that these comorbidities are frequently underdiagnosed and undertreated in TN patients. Herein it was investigated if rats submitted to the infraorbital nerve constriction (CION), a model of trigeminal neuropathic pain, would display anxiety- and depressive-like behaviors in addition to the facial sensory changes in different time points after the nerve injury. ⋯ The depressive-like behavior was assessed by measuring the time of immobility on the forced swim test (FST) and sucrose preference (SP) in rats previously tested for heat (day 5) and mechanical allodynia (days 15, 30 and 45) induced by CION. The evaluation of immobility time on FST and sucrose preference consumption revealed that both CION rats did not displayed depressive- and anhedonic-like behavior at any time point evaluated. Altogether, these results demonstrate that trigeminal neuropathic pain in rats leads to the development of anxiety-, but not depressive-like behavior, suggesting that the CION model represents a methodology that allows the study of drugs targeting both pain and anxiety.