Disorders of the Nervous System
Author: María Jesús Trujillo | Email: jesutruji@gmail.com
María Jesús Trujillo 1°, Florencia Vassallu 1°, Milagros López 1°, Lionel Muller Igaz 1°, Fernando Kasanetz 1°
1° Universidad de Buenos Aires – CONICET. Instituto de Fisiología y Biofísica Bernardo Houssay (IFIBIO Houssay), Facultad de Medicina, Departamento de Ciencias Fisiológicas. Grupo Neurociencia en Sistemas. Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Chronic neuropathic pain (NP) is a severe neurological condition with significant clinical relevance. Beyond sensory discomfort, it leads to cognitive impairments and emotional disorders, lowering patients’ quality of life. Although this comorbidity is clinically recognized, the cellular pathophysiological mechanisms bridging persistent pain and cognitive/emotional issues remain uncertain.
The spared nerve injury of the sciatic nerve (SNI), a well-established model that is useful to study the long-term consequences of NP in rodents, has been shown to lead to cognitive and emotional impairments concomitant with neural changes in various brain regions. However, research often focuses on time-periods close to the lesion. To understand in detail the long-term behavioral impact of SNI intervention animals were subjected to several behavioral tests at one, two, three and four months post-lesion. Spatial working memory, sociability as well as locomotion and exploratory behaviors showed no differences between groups. Additional analysis conducted al 4 months post-surgery showed preserved performance related to anxiety and repetitive behaviors.
These results indicate that SNI in young adult mice is not sufficient to induce robust cognitive and emotional symptoms associated to persistent NP. To further evaluate the impact of NP we plan to analyze the expression of neurodegeneratives markers in brain areas associated to affective encoding.