Spinal vs supraspinal actions of morphine on cat spinal cord multireceptive neurons

To examine whether morphine elicits a supraspinal mediated spinal inhibition of nociceptive transmission, several investigators have compared the effects of morphine on nociceptive transmission in animals with the spinal cord intact vs transected or cold-blocked. The results have been conflicting, possibly due to different methods of analysis. For example, some investigators have found i.v. administered morphine produces a greater percentage decrease in nociceptive transmission when the spinal cord is intact compared to the transected state. Therefore, they concluded that morphine elicits a supraspinal-mediated inhibition. Conversely, others have reported that the increase in noxious stimulus-evoked responses of dorsal horn neurons upon cold blocking the spinal cord was reduced by i.v. morphine. They therefore concluded that morphine decreases descending inhibition. We tested the effects of i.v. morphine on spinal cord multireceptive neurons in the presence and absence of descending inhibition. Using the above methods of analysis, our results were found to be consistent with their findings which indicate that the method of analysis used is critical to the interpretation reached. To determine how these calculations would be affected by a depressant effect on the spinal cord neurons only, we performed similar experiments iontophoresing gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) onto these dorsal horn neurons. The similarity between the morphine and GABA data suggests that the effects of systemically administered morphine on multireceptive dorsal horn neurons can be adequately explained by a spinal cord site of action.