Following unilateral spinal contusion pregabalin has an at‐time effect on pruritus and a protective effect on mechanosensory nociception, but does not improve ipsilateral motor outcomes with early administration in rats
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Anticonvulsants like pregabalin (PGB) are the first‐line treatment for neuropathic pain caused by traumatic injury and non‐traumatic diseases of the central nervous system. Recent evidence from a human cohort study suggests that early use of pregabalin after spinal cord injury (SCI) may result in improved motor scores, however, it is unknown to what extent changes in spinal neural circuitry are involved. Using a rat model of unilateral cervical contusion, we examined the effect of pregabalin treatment on both motor and sensory function. For four weeks post‐injury, rats were given daily pregabalin or filtered water via oral gavage. Motor function was scored using the Montoya staircase assessment for food pellet retrieval (MSA). Additionally, pruritus and noxious mechosensation were assessed through behavioural evidence of scratching and the Randall‐Selitto analgesiometre, respectively. Finally, we used immunohistochemistry to characterize the primary afferent axons responsible for conveying signals related to nociception and itch. We found no significant relationship between the early administration of pregabalin and improved motor scores in the affected forelimb following MSA analysis. However, rats receiving pregabalin had improved performance on the MSA using their contralateral paw, suggesting alleviation of ongoing pain. Additionally, we found that self‐injurious scratching, often displayed by animals with this type of injury, was greatly reduced in those treated with PGB. However, following a two‐month sham injury experiment without PGB treatment, it was found that the scratching was not necessarily due to SCI, except for a small number of cases in which scratching included the territory of the greater auricular nerve. Furthermore, results of the Randall‐Selitto analgesiometre indicate a protective effect that lasted after discontinuation of PGB. Finally, we saw no changes in the density of pruritic and nociceptive primary afferents just rostral to the site of injury. Our findings suggest that in rats with a unilateral SCI, PGB treatment has a possible protective effect on mechanosensory nociception, aids in diminishing pain and itch during use, and contrary to the human cohort study, does not improve motor outcomes with early administration. Support or Funding Information Wings for Life; Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal .
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".