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Failure of Placebo Analgesia Model in Rats with Inflammatory Pain

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Abstract

With the shifting role of placebos, there is a need to develop animal models of placebo analgesia and elucidate the mechanisms underlying the effect. In the present study, male Sprague-Dawley rats with chronic inflammatory pain caused by complete Freund’s adjuvant (CFA) underwent a series of conditioning procedures, in which morphine was associated with different cues, but they failed to induce placebo analgesia. Then, conditioning with the conditioned place preference apparatus successfully induced analgesic expectancy and placebo analgesia in naïve rats but only induced analgesic expectancy and no analgesic effect in CFA rats. Subsequently, we found enhanced c-fos expression in the nucleus accumbens and reduced expression in the anterior cingulate cortex in naïve rats while c-fos expression in the anterior cingulate cortex in CFA rats was not altered. In summary, the behavioral conditioning model demonstrated the difficulty of establishing a placebo analgesia model in rats with a pathological condition.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31720103908, 31530028, and 81821092) and the National Basic Research Development Program of the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2017YFA0701300).

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  1. Xiang-Sha Yin and Jin-Yu Yang have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Neurobiology, School of Basic Medical Sciences and Neuroscience Research Institute, Key Laboratory for Neuroscience, Ministry of Education of China, and National Health Commission, State key Laboratory of Natural and Biomimetic Drugs, Peking University, Beijing, 100083, China

    Xiang-Sha Yin, Jin-Yu Yang, Shuai Cao & Yun Wang

  2. PKU-IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Yun Wang

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  1. Xiang-Sha Yin
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Yin, XS., Yang, JY., Cao, S. et al. Failure of Placebo Analgesia Model in Rats with Inflammatory Pain. Neurosci. Bull. 36, 121–133 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12264-019-00420-6

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