Modulating Cortical and Sub-cortical Brain Circuits in Chronic Facial Pain

描述(申请人提供)：在慢性面部疼痛中调节皮质和皮质下的大脑回路慢性疼痛，特别是面部疼痛很难治疗，因为它与各种神经系统变化有关。使用动物模型在分子水平上对这些变化进行表征，得出了在很大程度上没有转化到人类身上的见解，也许是因为这些变化的分子复杂性确保了在不同物种之间进行比较时会存在显著的差异。另一方面，在神经电路水平上，可能定义与疼痛状态相关的内表型，这可能更好地跨物种(和跨患者)推广，因为它们位于许多不同上游分子变化的下游，并且可能因果地与疼痛状态相关或预测疼痛状态。因此，我们建议通过使用我们开发的新方法以时间上精确的方式光学沉默疼痛回路中的候选脑区来研究疼痛模型，并使用功能磁共振成像(FMRI)评估对疼痛行为以及对疼痛回路的影响。通过这种方式，我们将解析出神经回路对疼痛内表型的全脑贡献。通过将我们的研究扩展到疼痛行为之外，我们将更好地了解慢性疼痛的整体行为效应以及特定中枢神经系统区域在调节这些行为效应中的作用(S)，并有望在人类中建立更好的慢性疼痛模型。 公共卫生相关性：确定定义慢性面部疼痛状态的神经底物是开发从基础研究推广到人类的治疗方法的关键一步，也是推广到人类患者的治疗方法。通过超越分子变化的组合复杂性，理解疼痛是如何在大脑中表现的，如光学神经控制和脑功能成像所描述的那样，我们将开发新的疼痛生物标志物，准确地反映疼痛状态，从而促进治疗、诊断和药物发现的状态。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Modulating Cortical and Sub-cortical Brain Circuits in Chronic Facial Pain Chronic pain, especially facial pain is difficult to treat because it is associated with an enormous diversity of nervous system alterations. Characterizations of these changes at the molecular level, using animal models, have yielded insights that largely have not translated to the human, perhaps because the molecular complexity of the changes insures that significant differences will exist when comparing across species. At a neural circuit level, on the other hand, it may be possible to define endophenotypes that correlate with pain state, that may better generalize across species (and across patients) because they are convergently downstream of many different upstream molecular changes, and may causally be associatable with, or predict, pain state. Accordingly, we propose to study rat models of pain by optically silencing, in a temporally-precise manner, candidate brain regions in the pain circuit using novel methods we have developed, and assessing the impact on pain behavior, as well as on the pain circuit using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In this way we will parse out the brainwide contribution of a neural circuit to pain endophenotype. By expanding our investigation beyond pain behaviors we will better understand the global behavioral effects of chronic pain and the role(s) of specific CNS regions in modulating these behavioral effects, and hopefully better model chronic pain in humans. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Determining the neural substrates that define the chronic facial pain state is a key step in developing treatments that generalize from basic research to humans, and also that generalize across human patients. By moving beyond the combinatorial complexity of molecular changes, to the understanding of how pain is represented in the brain, as described by optical neural control and functional brain imaging, we will develop new biomarkers for pain that accurately reflect the pain state, thus advancing the state of therapy, diagnosis, and drug discovery.