P 170 A potential signature for ongoing pain in mice

Chronic pain is a major health care problem nowadays with no convincing treatment yet (Apkarian et al., 2009). One challenge of research and treatment of pain is that it cannot be objectively quantified. Only indirect measurements like the Visual Analogue Scale for humans and responses to mechanical or thermal stimuli for animals are used. Electrophysiological changes in brain activity are a possible candidate for a direct measurement of pain and could be easily obtained by EEG recordings. However most of the studies with this scope are focused on evoked potentials of short lasting pain stimuli (ms to s) (Zhang et al., 2012) and only few studies have been conducted on longer lasting pain (Leblanc et al., 2014).

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