Banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO: LAURA DE OLIVEIRA KOREN

Uma banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO de MESTRADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
STUDENT : LAURA DE OLIVEIRA KOREN
DATE: 03/12/2025
TIME: 14:00
LOCAL: https://meet.google.com/uac-rxrw-bcj
TITLE:

Ethology as a tool to understand the multidimension of chronic pain.

KEY WORDS:

ethology; neuropathic pain; mice behaviour;

PAGES: 45
BIG AREA: Ciências Biológicas
AREA: Fisiologia
SUMMARY:

Pain is often mistaken for merely an unpleasant physical sensation, but it extends far beyond this. It affects emotional, cognitive, social, and nociceptive aspects of the individual experiencing it. So why do we predominantly treat only the latter? It is logical that medications for chronic pain target the inhibition of pain stimuli, closing "the gate" and preventing pain information from reaching supraspinal levels for processing. However, these medications (such as opioids, gabapentinoids, and tricyclic antidepressants) are effective for only 30%-40% of patients suffering from chronic pain, leaving the majority without adequate assistance or effective options for symptom relief. Furthermore, in pre-clinical models for studying pain pathologies, the gold standards rely exclusively on nociceptive metrics, and even when researchers include experiments to observe emotional comorbidities, these are typically conducted in different animals, making data integration and correlation more difficult and, consequently, hindering translation to the clinic. In this scenario, the ethological approach emerges as a valuable tool for studying pain in all its aspects, integrating nociceptive metrics—such as mechanical and thermal hyperalgesia—with emotional, social, cognitive, and well-being parameters. In this study, we propose a new model to investigate C57BL/6 mice behavior throughout the chronification of neuropathic pain, induced by chronic constriction injury of the right sciatic nerve. After monitoring the animals for three weeks and collecting data on 13 different parameters, classified as sensory-discriminative, socio-emotional, cognitive-avaliative, and general state, we applied comparative analyses between the injury and control groups. The main objective of this project was to better characterize the manifestation of neuropathic pain to optimize the development of new therapies targeting multiple aspects of pain, while also optimizing the use of animals in experimentation. This involves reducing the number of experimental subjects by applying multiple tests to a single animal and decreasing human intervention in test application—many of the parameters analyzed are derived from continuous recordings of animals in their housing cages, which reduces animal stress and better approximates the experimental environment and behavioral responses to natural pain manifestations, facilitating clinical translation.

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
Presidente - 1728817 - CLAUDIO MARCOS TEIXEIRA DE QUEIROZ
Interno - 1824636 - RICHARDSON NAVES LEAO
Interno - 1660044 - SIDARTA TOLLENDAL GOMES RIBEIRO