The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience
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Comparative Study
Upregulation of acid-sensing ion channel ASIC1a in spinal dorsal horn neurons contributes to inflammatory pain hypersensitivity.
Development of chronic pain involves alterations in peripheral nociceptors as well as elevated neuronal activity in multiple regions of the CNS. Previous pharmacological and behavioral studies suggest that peripheral acid-sensing ion channels (ASICs) contribute to pain sensation, and the expression of ASIC subunits is elevated in the rat spinal dorsal horn (SDH) in an inflammatory pain model. However, the cellular distribution and the functional consequence of increased ASIC subunit expression in the SDH remain unclear. ⋯ Moreover, in vivo electrophysiological recording showed that the elevated ASIC1a activity is required for two forms of central sensitization: C-fiber-induced "wind-up" and CFA-induced hypersensitivity of SDH nociceptive neurons. Together, our results reveal that increased ASIC activity in SDH neurons promotes pain by central sensitization. Specific blockade of Ca2+-permeable ASIC1a channels thus may have antinociceptive effect by reducing or preventing the development of central sensitization induced by inflammation.
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Some movements that animals and humans make are highly stereotyped, repeated with little variation. The patterns of neural activity associated with repeats of a movement may be highly similar, or the same movement may arise from different patterns of neural activity, if the brain exploits redundancies in the neural projections to muscles. We examined the stability of the relationship between neural activity and behavior. ⋯ The small changes in neural activity that we did observe could be accounted for primarily by subtle changes in behavior. We conclude that the relationship between neural activity and practiced behavior is reasonably stable, at least on timescales of minutes up to 48 h. This finding has significant implications for the design of neural prosthetic systems because it suggests that device recalibration need not be overly frequent, It also has implications for studies of neural plasticity because a stable baseline permits identification of nonstationary shifts.