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Editor’s note: The 17th IASP World Congress on Pain took place September 12-16, 2018, in Boston, US. At the Congress, 12 early-career pain researchers took part in the PRF Correspondents Program, a science communications…

When it comes to the experimental tools that researchers use to understand pain at the cellular and molecular level, dorsal root ganglion neurons from animals—and more recently from human…

Open any college neuroscience textbook to the chapter on sensory perception and you’ll quickly learn that you can’t tickle yourself, no matter how hard you try (and chances are,…

The experience of pain includes both sensory and affective components. Pain researchers have learned a lot about the former—about the peripheral mechanisms by which noxious stimuli are transduced into…

After six years of work, an International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) Working Group led by Rolf-Detlef Treede, Heidelberg University, Mannheim, Germany, and co-chair Winfried Rief, Philipps-Universität…

Past experiences shape our expectations about the future, and those expectations can simultaneously affect how we experience new events. Sometimes this can result in a self-fulfilling prophecy where people…

Botulinum toxin, a neurotoxin made by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum, inhibits neuronal signaling by blocking neurotransmitter release, leading to paralysis. Researchers from University College London (UCL), UK; the University…

Non-peptide opioid drugs like morphine and fentanyl bind to opioid receptors (ORs) on the neuronal cell membrane, just as naturally occurring peptide OR ligands do, to bring about analgesia.…

Patients who take opioids for chronic pain typically develop tolerance to these drugs. Now, researchers led by Taka-aki Koshimizu, Jichi Medical University, Shimotsuke, Japan, and Yukio Takano, Fukuoka University,…

Pain researchers and advocates are cheering the announcement of the HEAL (Helping to End Addiction Long-term) Initiative, which promises to roughly double US National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding…

Survival is the prime directive of every animal, and it takes work. Animals are under constant threat from starvation, thirst, extreme temperatures, and life-threatening injury and illness. But when…

For decades, researchers have looked for the molecular sensors tuned to potentially harmful heat. Now, a team led by Joris Vriens and Thomas Voets, University of Leuven, Belgium, has…