pretty amazing research. if anybody's interested in pain or microglia research – I highly recommend this read. I read this short neuroscience communication paper and the press releases surrounding it. they don't present much detail, but it appears to be a valid and robust study.
most pain research is done on mice – male mice only ( The females more complex hormonal system makes it more difficult to tease out the data implications). this research potentially invalidates or puts into question a lot of the pain research, especially when to comes to females.
this paper also clearly demonstrates the complexities and the involvement of the immune system and the nervous system and also the additional complexities that are involved in female system ( at least in my eyes).. Females seem to use different pathways for allodynia pain transmission than mice, but also can use The male pathway that uses microglia if the adaptive immune system pathway is blocked.
among their many findings, they state,
These data indicate that, in the absence of adaptive immune cells, female mice use the male, glial-dependent pathway, as was the case for testosterone-treated females.
and another:
The behavioral sex difference was accompanied by an analogous sex difference in dorsal horn gene expression, whereby SNI upregulated P2rx4 gene expression in male, but not female, mice (Supplementary Fig. 7).
SNI is spared nerve injury. P2x4 is one of the upregulated genes in people with "cfs with FM" in the study by Dr. Alan Light.....and that study looked at female and male subjects...human...
As
@Jonathan Edwards has pointed out repeatedly, This research also shows the importance of good research study design; in this case the consideration of potential sex differences.
and of course, it's always good to keep in mind that it's a long ways from mice to humans....
