Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2009
Abstract
Anatomical and physiological studies conducted in the 1960s identified the periaqueductal gray (PAG) and its descending projections to the rostral ventromedial medulla (RVM) and spinal cord dorsal horn, as a primary anatomical pathway mediating opioid-based analgesia. Since these initial studies, the PAG-RVM-spinal cord pathway has been characterized anatomically and physiologically in a wide range of vertebrate species. Remarkably, the majority of these studies were conducted exclusively in males with the implicit assumption that the anatomy and physiology of this circuit were the same in females; however, this is not the case. It is well established that morphine administration produces greater antinociception in males compared to females. Recent studies indicate that the PAG-RVM pathway contributes to the sexually dimorphic actions of morphine. This manuscript will review our anatomical, physiological, and behavioral data identifying sex differences in the PAG-RVM pathway, focusing on its role in pain modulation and morphine analgesia.
Recommended Citation
Loyd, D. R., & Murphy, A. Z. (2009). The role of the periaqueductal gray in the modulation of pain in males and females: Are the anatomy and physiology really that different? Neural Plasticity, 2009(462879), 1-12. doi:10.1155/2009/462879
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Comments
This article was originally published in the journal Neural Plasticity and is posted here with the permission of the author.
Copyright © 2009 D. R. Loyd and A. Z. Murphy. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.