Immune System and Pain: Preclinical and Clinical Understanding
A special issue of Diagnostics (ISSN 2075-4418). This special issue belongs to the section "Pathology and Molecular Diagnostics".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 November 2020) | Viewed by 154
Special Issue Editors
Interests: key bio-markers; the pathogenesis of chronic pain
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Pain is defined as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage.” Chronic pain, lasting for more than three months, represents one of the main worldwide problems, in term of social and economic resources, causing severe and intractable physical and psychological suffering. The lack of specific biomarkers is a great limitation in pain medicine, because it does not allow a precise diagnosis and appropriate treatments. Unequivocal markers are urgently needed to bypass sensory–discriminative, affective–motivational, and cognitive–evaluative pain limits. Several studies have presented pain as the result of the synergy between immune and nervous systems. The crucial link is the evidence that opioid peptides and their receptors are expressed both in the nervous system and the immune cell surface. However, the function of opioid receptors in the immune system cells, when and why are activated, and what their relation is with pain are still topics of discussion. Recent evidence on different chronic pain diseases (e.g., osteoarthritis and fibromyalgia) describes common characteristics in the expression of opioid receptors in diverse levels of pain.
In light of this, it is essential that we build a holistic understanding of the relation between pain and immune pathways, focusing on the common elements between the two systems, in order to detect pain biomarkers, improve diagnosis, and propose new clinical approaches.
Prof. Dr. Valentina Malafoglia
Prof. Dr. Antonello Bonci
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- Acute pain diagnosis
- Chronic pain diagnosis
- Pain biomarkers
- Neuroinflammation
- Opioid system
- Opioid receptors on immune cells surface
- Endocannabinoid system
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