Abstract

A REVIEW ON NEUROPATHIC PAIN: AN APPROACH TOWARDS TREATMENT

Abstract

Neuropathic pain is characterized by a primary lesion or dysfunction in the central or peripheral nervous system in which peripheral nerve injury is associated with the presence of abnormal and unpleasant sensory symptoms, such as hyperalgesia (an increased response to a normally painful stimulus) and allodynia (pain in response to a stimulus which does not normally provoke pain; patients with allodynia do not feel pain in the absence of stimulus). Importantly, many of these mechanisms do not depend on the cause of the disease: the same mechanism can be found in different diseases (e.g., in postherpetic neuralgia and in painful polyneuropathy). The mechanism of neuropathic pain is complex, therefore the current treatments are causing a variety of adverse effects. The widely used drug for the treatment of chronic to moderate pain is morphine but the therapeutic value of the same is still controversial because in some patients with neuropathic pain opioids are reported to be ineffective In this review, we will focus on the mechanism of neuropathic pain, the animal models and possible treatments of neuropathic pain.

Keywords: hyperalgesia, allodynia, ectopic, transient receptor potential vanilloid, ephaptic.