The Post-Operative Pain Model in Pigs
Post-operative pain management is a major challenge for clinicians and patients. Unrelieved post-operative pain management causes patient suffering and discomfort, and can promote psychological and pathophysiological obstacles (Castel et al., 2014). While therapeutic agents and analgesic techniques are available, a large number of patients report moderate to severe pain following surgery. For this reason, it is essential to continue researching analgesic treatments for post-operative pain.
Rodents have been the model of choice for the development of new treatments for acute pain, however, several limitations exist. Rodents are not useful for assessing topical and localized treatments, the anatomy of the skin differs from human skin, and healing occurs by wound contraction. Since pigs share similarities with human skin and heal by epidermal cell migration, MD Biosciences Neuro has characterized a porcine model for post-operative pain (POP) through skin incision and skin and muscle incision and retraction.
Advantages of the POP Model in Pigs
Common Assessments
Sex Differences
In the last decade, it has been shown that women are more susceptible to post-operative pain than men (Lau & Patil, 2004; Nadi et al., 2019., Zheng et al., 2017, Mogil 2020). This suggests that women are more sensitive to pain and less tolerant to therapeutics compared to men. Using our POP model in pigs, we found that females are more sensitive to males, highlighting the importance of using both sexes in the study of pain. (Download poster here).
MD Biosciences Neuro POP Publications
References