Regional anesthesia and pain medicine
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Reg Anesth Pain Med · May 2002
Gabapentin produces dose-dependent antinociception in the orofacial formalin test in the rat.
High neuraxial drug infusion has been advocated for the treatment of intractable cranial and facial pain in humans. Currently, parallel animal models have not been characterized to support this methodology. We combined an accepted animal model of pain of cranial origin with a novel technique of cervico-medullary drug delivery to determine the antinociceptive potential of gabapentin. Gabapentin was chosen because of its reported efficacy in a wide array of complex cranial pain syndromes. ⋯ Gabapentin produced dose-dependent antinociception in the second phase of the orofacial formalin test in the rat after injection into the cervico-medullary cerebrospinal fluid. This animal model may be useful to assess analgesics designed for parallel clinical application in humans for the treatment of intractable head and neck pain that is refractory to conventional modalities.