ANALYSIS OF BEHAVIORAL ASSAYS USED FOR ASSESSMENT OF MIGRAINE-LIKE PAIN IN MICE

Abstract

Migraine is a common pain disorder that severely impedes daily life for many individuals. To address the evident prevalence and burden of migraine, there is a growing need for the development of new therapeutic interventions. However, there has been a hindrance in the discovery of new analgesics for chronic pain in general due to a translational gap that exists between preclinical advances and clinical interventions. This gap is partially the result of an over-reliance on acute models of pain and experimenter-evoked outcome measures. It has been proposed that the study of spontaneous, elective behaviors may be more translationally relevant measures of chronic pain. For instance, changes in cage hanging, a natural behavior displayed by rodents, has been shown to be an indicator of sustained pain. Rearing behavior, which is an important exploratory component of locomotion in rodents, can also be reduced during a painful event. The purpose of the present study is to determine if cage hanging and/or rearing are useful dependent measures of migraine pain specifically. We found that induction of migraine-like pain through supradural injection of inflammatory mediators reduced cage hanging and rearing in mice. Currently, we cannot conclusively state that these behaviors are reliable measures of pain specific to migraine headache, but we show promising results that will be expanded on in the future.