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Regulation des Ca2+ Signals durch CaMKII in DRG von Ratten
- Abstract
- Neuropathic pain is caused by nerve injury and accompanies various diseases like trauma, surgical procedures, inflammation, HIV/AIDS and cancer. A lot of people are inadequately treated by current medical care. One reason is that the pathophysiology of neuropathic pain is not well understood at the cellular level. The neurons in the so-called dorsal root ganglion are especially interesting, because they seem to play an important role in the development of this disease and they are accessible for local therapy by needle injection to offer new treatment options without systemic side effects.
Calcium plays a very important role as a second messenger in these cells. It critically regulates diverse neuronal function including excitability, syntheses of proteins and is even responsible for the programmed cell death. In previous studies we could show that the overall calcium signal is reduced in injured neurons.
With this research project we demonstrated that the endoplasmic reticulum, which acts as a regulator of the intracellular calcium concentration, is impaired in its function after nerve injury. This malfunction is especially true in neurons, which are thought to play a role in the development of neuropathic pain. One important function of the endoplasmic reticulum is the augmentation and modulation of the calcium signal after neuronal activation. With the different experiments it was possible to prove that reduced capacity of the endoplasmic reticulum is the reason for the malfunction and not reduced activity of receptors or ion channels. Also electron microscopic pictures showed altered microanatomy of the endoplasmic reticulum.
Further research in this area will increase our knowledge on the mechanism causing these changes and this will possibly lead to the development of new treatment options, which might help millions of people suffering from neuropathic pain.
- Keywords
- functional pathology
- pathophysiology
- neurophysiology
- pain therapy
- anaesthesiology
- Neuropsychology
- Project Leader:
- Rigaud Marcel
- Duration:
- 05.03.2007-05.01.2008
- Programme:
- Schrödinger-Stipendium
- Type of Research
- basic research
- Staff
- Rigaud, Marcel, Project Leader
- MUG Research Units
- Division of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine 1
- Project partners
-
Medical College of Wisconsin, United States (USA)
Contact person: Prof. Q. Hogan, M.D.;