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Retrograde Cellular Changes After Nerve Injury

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Encyclopedia of Pain

Synonyms

Axotomy; Bennett model; Chung model; Gazelius model; Nerve injury; Nerve ligation; Other types of nerve injury; Seltzer model; Spared nerve injury

Definition

Retrograde changes here refer to the alteration in expression of various molecules in the parent dorsal root ganglion (DRG, sensory) or autonomic neurons after any type of lesion of the peripheral axon (branch). This occurs in humans after various types of lesions, for example, surgery, and is mimicked in experimental animal models, mainly in attempts to understand mechanisms underlying neuropathic pain.

Characteristics

Nerve Injury and Neuropathic Pain

Nerve injury, such as transection of a nerve (axotomy), occurs under a wide variety of circumstances in real life, ranging from a simple accidental cut during cooking to more or less complicated surgical procedures in hospitals, amputation of a limb being the extreme. Early work on experimental animals by Wall, Devor, and colleagues showed that such a transection has...

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Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council, the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation, the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, funds from Karolinska Institutet, the International Association for the Study of Pain, an Unrestricted Bristol-Myers Squibb Neuroscience Grant, CONICET (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas), and the Austral University. We thank Drs. Zsuzsanna Wiesenfeld-Hallin, Xiao-Jun Xu, and Zhang Xu for valuable support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Biomedical Sciences, Austral University, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Pablo Brumovsky & Marcelo Villar

  2. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Pablo Brumovsky

  3. Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden

    Tomas Hökfelt

Authors
  1. Pablo Brumovsky
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  2. Marcelo Villar
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  3. Tomas Hökfelt
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Pablo Brumovsky .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anesthesiology, Center for Pain Research, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Gerald F. Gebhart

  2. Physiologisches Institut der, Universität Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany

    Robert F. Schmidt

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Brumovsky, P., Villar, M., Hökfelt, T. (2013). Retrograde Cellular Changes After Nerve Injury. In: Gebhart, G.F., Schmidt, R.F. (eds) Encyclopedia of Pain. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28753-4_3823

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