Research Unit on Women's Health-INCLIVA, Institute of Health Research, 46010 Valencia, Spain.
Bayer AG. Research & Early Development, Pharmaceuticals, Exploratory Pathobiology, Aprather Weg 18a, 42096 Wuppertal, Germany.
Int J Mol Sci. 2023 Jan 26;24(3):2422. doi: 10.3390/ijms24032422.
Chronic pain induced by endometriosis is a maladaptive pain experienced by half of women with this disease. The lack of pharmacological treatments suitable for the long-term relief of endometriosis-associated pain, without an impact on fertility, remains an urgent unmet need. Progress has been slowed by the absence of a reproducible rodent endometriosis model that fully replicates human physiopathological characteristics, including pain symptoms. Although pain assessment in rodents is a complicated task requiring qualified researchers, the choice of the behavioral test is no less important, since selecting inappropriate tests can cause erroneous data. Pain is usually measured with reflex tests in which hypersensitivity is evaluated by applying a noxious stimulus, yet this ignores the associated emotional component that could be evaluated via non-reflex tests. We conducted a systematic review of endometriosis models used in rodents and the number of them that studied pain. The type of behavioral test used was also analyzed and classified according to reflex and non-reflex tests. Finally, we determined the most used reflex tests for the study of endometriosis-induced pain and the main non-reflex behavioral tests utilized in visceral pain that can be extrapolated to the study of endometriosis and complement traditional reflex tests.
子宫内膜异位症引起的慢性疼痛是患有这种疾病的女性中有一半人经历的一种适应性疼痛。缺乏适合长期缓解与子宫内膜异位症相关疼痛而又不影响生育能力的药物治疗方法，仍然是一个亟待满足的需求。由于缺乏能够完全复制人类生理病理特征（包括疼痛症状）的可复制的啮齿动物子宫内膜异位症模型，进展受到了阻碍。尽管啮齿动物的疼痛评估是一项需要合格研究人员的复杂任务，但行为测试的选择同样重要，因为选择不适当的测试会导致错误的数据。疼痛通常通过反射测试来测量，其中通过施加有害刺激来评估过敏反应，但这忽略了可以通过非反射测试评估的相关情感成分。我们对用于啮齿动物的子宫内膜异位症模型以及研究疼痛的模型数量进行了系统评价。还根据反射和非反射测试分析和分类了所使用的行为测试类型。最后，我们确定了用于研究子宫内膜异位症引起的疼痛的最常用的反射测试，以及用于内脏疼痛的主要非反射行为测试，这些测试可外推用于子宫内膜异位症的研究，并补充传统的反射测试。
