How naked mole rats conquered pain —and what it could mean for us | Science | AAAS

This study points us to important areas … that might be targeted to reduce this type of pain."Naked mole rats are just plain weird. They live almost totally underground in coloniesstructured like honey bee hives, with hundreds of workers servicing a single queen and her few consorts. To survive, they dig kilometers of tunnels in search of large underground tubers for food. It's such a tough life that —to conserve energy—this member of the rodent family gave up regulating its temperature, and they are able to thrive in a low-oxygen, high–carbon dioxide environment that would suffocate or be very painful to humans."They might as well be from another planet," says Thomas Park, a neuroscientist at the University of Illinois, Chicago.Gary Lewin, a neuroscientist at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association in Berlin, began working with naked mole rats because a friend in Chicago was finding that the rodent's pain fibers were not the same as other mammals'. In 2008, the studies led to the finding that naked mole rats didn't feel pain when they came into contact with acid and didn't get more sensitive to heat or touch when injured, like we and other mammals do. Lewin was hooked and has been raising the rodents in his lab ever since. They are a little more challenging than rats or mice, he notes, because with just one female per colony producing young, he never really has quite enough individuals for hi...

Source: Psychology of Pain - October 12, 2016 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs