Review Article Microglia and Spinal Cord Synaptic Plasticity in Persistent Pain

Copyright © 2013 Sarah Taves et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Microglia are regarded as macrophages in the central nervous system (CNS) and play an important role in neuroinflammation in the CNS.Microglial activation has been strongly implicated in neurodegeneration in the brain. Increasing evidence also suggests an important role of spinal cordmicroglia in the genesis of persistent pain, by releasing the proinflammatory cytokines tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TN