Animal Pain Assessment Essay

The International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) defines human pain as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage (Loeser, 2008). It is a complex sensory experience that can even be modifiable without the use of a physical harm. While in contrast, there isn’t an animal-based definition of animal pain. A commonly used definition for animals is ‘ an aversive sensory experience caused by actual or potential injury that elicits protective and vegetative reactions, results in learned behaviour, and may modify species specific behaviour’ (Sneddon et al., 2014). In humans, an adult person may be able to verbally express the distress caused by a painful situation. In animal experimentation or clinical procedures pain assessment is a challenge, due to its subjectivity. An increasing issue of pain assessment is that it often relies on behavioural measures that without a proper experimental design, results are found to be subjective instead of being …show more content…
The main animal models for these studies are mice; its use as an animal model has provided outstanding information about the mechanism underlying the state of pain. (Graham et al., 2012) Pain assessment studies apply knowledge from different scientific areas such as physiopathology, psychology, ethology and even social areas for future regulations, among others. From a genetic and molecular point of view, the research done in mice as animal model of pain has even lead to the creation of a gene database that lists publications of genes and their protein products in pain processing in transgenic mice (LaCroix-Fralish et al., 2007). However, there is a necessity for objective and reliable pain assessment methods that can be used during surgical procedures, experimental situations, or on field