Post-Operative Pain

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

• Reproducibility 
• Mimics human condition
• Monitoring of PK/PD 
• Routes and volumes of administration relevant to humans 
• Understanding of safety/PD/PK using the same animals

 

Common Assessments

• Withdrawal force 
• Composite behavior score 
• Open field
• Approaching time
• In vivo electrophysiology 

 

 

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