RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Evoked and spontaneous pain assessment during tooth pulp injury
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 742049
DO 10.1101/742049
A1 Heather Lynn Rossi
A1 Lily Pachanin See
A1 William Foster
A1 Saumitra Pitake
A1 Jennifer Gibbs
A1 Brian Schmidt
A1 Claire H. Mitchell
A1 Ishmail Abdus-Saboor
YR 2019
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/08/21/742049.abstract
AB Injury of the tooth pulp is excruciatingly painful and yet the receptors and neural circuit mechanisms that transmit this form of pain remain poorly defined in both the clinic and preclinical rodent models. Easily quantifiable behavioral assessment in the rodent orofacial area remains a major bottleneck in uncovering molecular mechanisms that govern inflammatory pain in the tooth. Here we use a dental pulp injury model in the mouse and expose the tooth pulp to the outside environment, a procedure we have previously shown produces pulpal inflammation. We demonstrate here with RNAscope technology in the trigeminal ganglion of injured mice, an upregulation of genes that contribute to the inflammatory pain state. Using both evoked and spontaneous measures of pain in the orofacial area, including application of von Frey Hair filaments and pain feature detection with the mouse grimace scale, we reveal a differential timeline of induction of spontaneous pain versus mechanical allodynia following pulpal injury. This work demonstrates that tooth pain can be easily assessed in freely behaving mice using approaches common for other types of pain assessment. Harnessing these assays in the orofacial area during gene manipulation should assist in uncovering mechanisms for tooth pulp inflammation and other forms of trigeminal pain.