Pain in the Developing Brain: Early Life Factors Alter Nociception and Neurobiological Function in Adolescent Rats
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although adverse early experiences prime individuals to be at increased risk for chronic pain, little research has examined the trauma-pain relationship in early life or the underlying mechanisms that drive pathology over time. Given that early experiences can potentiate the nociceptive response, this study aimed to examine the effects of a high-fat, high-sugar (HFHS) diet and early life stress (maternal separation [MS]) on pain outcomes in male and female adolescent rats. Half of the rats also underwent a plantar-incision surgery to investigate how the pain system responded to a mildly painful stimuli in adolescence. Compared with controls, animals that were on the HFHS diet, experienced MS, or had exposure to both, exhibited increased anxiety-like behavior and altered thermal and mechanical nociception at baseline and following the surgery. Advanced magnetic resonance imaging demonstrated that the HFHS diet and MS altered the maturation of the brain, leading to changes in brain volume and diffusivity within the anterior cingulate, amygdala, corpus callosum, nucleus accumbens, and thalamus, while also modifying the integrity of the corticospinal tracts. The effects of MS and HFHS diet were often cumulative, producing exacerbated pain sensitivity and increased neurobiological change. As early experiences are modifiable, understanding their role in pain may provide targets for early intervention/prevention.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".