J Neurosci: new findings in pain research! Identify key proteins in the brain that can promote the maintenance of chronic pain in the body

October 18, 2019 / BIOON / -- recently, in a research report published in the Journal of neuroscience, scientists from Mount Sinai Hospital found that RGS4 (regulator of G protein signaling subunit 4) is a new type of protein 4) It may play an important role in maintaining the long-term chronic pain state of the body, or it may be a new potential target to help develop new therapies for human chronic pain and other diseases Photo source: cc0 public domain Relevant research has found that it can help clinicians to effectively block patients' acute pain from developing into chronic pain Under the condition of chronic pain, patients will not only feel pain, but also have a series of symptoms that make their body weak, such as feeling lack, depression and decreased exercise ability The transition from acute to chronic pain (pathological) is often accompanied by the immune response of the body The adaptive changes of epidemic cells, glial cells and neuron cells, many of which are still unclear to researchers At present, the treatment of neuropathic or chronic inflammatory pain is often limited and will bring serious side effects to patients; commonly used opioids can temporarily relieve some pain symptoms of patients, but long-term treatment will lead to serious risks such as addiction Therefore, researchers urgently need to develop a new treatment or drug for chronic pain, rather than simply It can relieve the pain symptoms of patients Researcher Venetia Professor zachariou said that this study revealed that RGS4 may promote patients' transition from acute and subacute pain to pathological pain and maintain pain state; because chronic pain state can affect many neurochemical processes of the body, and a single targeted drug is unlikely to play a role; however, what excited the researchers was that they found a multifunctional protein, or It can be used as a special target to interfere with the maintenance of patients' pain RGS4 is a multi-functional protein widely expressed in the brain circuit, which can deal with the pathological pain, emotion and motivation of the body Based on this study, researchers found that RGS4 plays a very important role in maintaining the pain state of the body (which is not related to the cause of pain is nerve injury or inflammation); using genetics When the RGS4 gene was deleted from the mouse model, the researchers found that inhibition of RGS4 activity could interfere with the maintenance of chronic pain in mice In particular, the researchers used genetically modified mice to study the key role of RGS4 in the induction, degree and maintenance of chronic pain symptoms They found that when RGS4 is inherited After inactivation, RGS4 does not affect the induction of acute pain or chronic pain On the contrary, RGS4 inactivation can promote the recovery of sensory hypersensitivity symptoms in the preclinical models of peripheral nerve injury, chemotherapy-induced neuropathy and peripheral inflammation Mice without RGS4 had all the expected neurological symptoms, but they recovered within 3 weeks, and the inhibition of RGS4 activity was directly related to the increase of motor related behaviors The researchers also used genetic tools to reduce the expression of RGS4 in the ventrolateral thalamus, a pain processing center that receives information from the spinal cord and transmits it to several cortical regions The researchers found that inhibition of RGS4 in the brain region can lead to the recovery of mechanical and cold pain In addition, they also used a new generation of sequencing technology to further understand the genes and intracellular pathways affected by RGS4 Later, the researchers further studied the role of RGS4 in the spinal cord and brain emotion regulation region, so as to better understand the effect of this protein on the body's feeling and emotional pain Mechanism of pain symptoms Finally, researcher zachariou said that at present, we are in-depth studying the role of RGS4 in spinal cord and brain emotion regulation area We hope to better understand the molecular mechanism of this protein affecting sensory and emotional pain symptoms, and we also hope to conduct more research to detect the therapeutic potential of RGS4 inhibitors Original sources: Kleopatra avrampou, Kerri D Pryce, aarthi Ramakrishnan, et al., RGS4 maintenances Chinese paint symptoms in road models, the Journal of Neuroscience (2019) Doi: 10.1523/jneurosci.3154-18.2019