Two opioid forms of stress analgesia: studies of tolerance and cross-tolerance.

We have previously reported that stress analgesia sensitive to and insensitive to opiate antagonists can be differentially produced in rats by varying the severity or temporal pattern of inescapable footshock. In these studies, we give further evidence for the opioid and non-opioid bases of these paradigms of stress analgesia. We find that naloxone-sensitive analgesia demonstrates tolerance with repeated stress and cross-tolerance with morphine, whereas naloxone-insensitive analgesia demonstrates neither of these characteristics. Moreover, different forms of opioid, but not non-opioid, stress analgesia manifest cross-tolerance with each other. These data are discussed in terms of the similarities and differences between two forms of opioid stress analgesia.