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Updated: Jun 20, 2026

Intracranial Pharmacotherapy and Pain Assays in Rodents
Published on: April 9, 2019
Rostral ventral medulla cholinergic mechanism in pain-induced analgesia
1Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, University of California, San Francisco, California 94143-0440, United States. robert.gear@ucsf.edu
Abstract:
The ascending nociceptive control (ANC), a novel spinostriatal pain modulation pathway, mediates a form of pain-induced analgesia referred to as noxious stimulus-induced antinociception (NSIA). ANC includes specific spinal cord mechanisms as well as circuitry in nucleus accumbens, a major component of the ventral striatum. Here, using the trigeminal jaw-opening reflex (JOR) in the rat as a nociceptive assay, we show that microinjection of the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR) antagonist mecamylamine into the rostral ventral medulla (RVM) blocks NSIA, implicating RVM as a potentially important link between ANC and the PAG-RVM-spinal descending pain modulation system. A circuit connecting nucleus accumbens to the RVM is proposed as a novel striato-RVM pathway.
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