Received: 2014.09.29 Accepted: 2014.10.13 Published: 2014.10.27 Modeled Behavior of Neuropathic Pain with Social Defect in Rats: A Preliminary Methodology Evaluation

Background: Social defect and chronic pain are 2 major health problems and recent data has demonstrated that they gen-erally exist concurrently. However, a powerful evaluation model on the behavioral change is lacking. This study was designed to evaluate the behavioral curves using a statistically modeled trajectory analysis in neuropath-ic animals with or without social defect exposure. Material/Methods: After approval by the institutional animal care committee, Sprague-Dawley rats were randomized into differ-ent interventional groups with 15 animals each. Sprague-Dawley rats underwent spared nerve injury (SNI) to establish the neuropathic pain model, of which the mechanical withdrawal threshold was measured using von Frey filaments for a period of 105 days. Otherwise, a modified version of the resident (Long-Evans rats)-in-truder paradigm was applied to produce a social defect animal model through the elevated plus maze (EPM). After raw data collection, we modeled them into a powerful statistical effects analysis to build up the behav-ioral change tendency in single SNI or in combined SNI and social defect animals. Results: The random and fixed effects analyses of the pain behavior after SNI were successfully modeled and demon-strated a gradient recovery tendency during the 15-week post-injury observational period. Correspondingly, SNI rats exhibited increased social defected symptoms, as indicated by the increased anxiety-like behavior in the EPM test. In addition, continuous social defect stress for 5 days or 10 days, respectively, partially attenuat