Advances in Translational Pain Research Related to Acute and Chronic Pain After Surgery: Parallel Experiments in Specific Rodent Pain Models, Humans and Patients

Preclinical disease-specific pain models in rodents are essential to advance our knowledge about mechanisms inherent in pain caused by specific conditions. One example is pain after surgery; rodent plantar incision models have been developed quite some years ago and have revealed that mechanisms inherent in pain after incision injury differ significantly from those mechanisms inherent in other pain conditions.This talk will present recent finding using these plantar incision models as well as major advancements in the field of translational postoperative pain research. First, the role of more procedure specific surgical models and the assessment of multidimensional pain-related behavior to increase the translation of preclinical findings to the clinic will be discussed. Furthermore, parallel studies in rodents, preclinical human incision models and in postoperative patients will be presented; examples here are gender- specific aspects and the role of sex hormones, beyond others. Finally, ongoing studies combining extensive phenotyping with quantitative proteomics in mice and humans enabling the detection of interspecies similarities and differences between mouse models and human subjects will be discussed. At the end a perspective how to identify protein networks relevant for acute and chronic pain after surgery in patients will be shown.