Year: 2018
Type: dissertation
Abstract: The ability to accurately measure pain is very important and can be used when assessing the effect of potential analgesics.The most common method of measuring pain involves reflex tests, where one observes the reflex response of an animal upon painful stimuli.This response is binary, since the observer can only differentiate between if the animal feels pain or not.This rough indication of nociception often leads to poor translation between test results and reality, which could lead to massive complications.In this thesis, two quantitative methods to measure nociception were compared and evaluated.The first method measures the neural activity in the primary somatosensory cortex (SI) and was evaluated through a literature study.The other method analyses the changes in gait exerted by the animal and was evaluated through experiments and video analysis.The first method is rather complex but showed great potential in accurately describing nociception in an animal through the potentials evoked in SI.The gait analysis method uncovered five different parameters which values correlated with increasing nociception.These five parameters together covered different aspects of describing the gait of an animal.The gait method is simpler than the neural recordings method, but it is more limited in the information it provides and in the experiments it can be used in.Comparing these two quantitative methods to the reflex method it is clear that the quantitative methods can provide much more accurate measurement of nociception and therefore help in accurately assessing the capacity of potential analgesics.
Author: Jakob Frank
Language: English
Subfield: Physiology (medical)
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2887822821