More Sensitive to Nonpainful Stimuli

According to researchers, “you don’t need obesity to trigger pain; you don’t need diabetes; you don’t need a pathology or injury at all. Eating a high-fat diet for a short period of time is enough." So says Dr. Michael Burton, a researcher at the University of Texas at Dallas, who, along with his colleagues sought to understand why "the interactions between diet, obesity, and diabetes is important to tease out mechanisms in painful pathology.” Their research is published in the journal of Scientific Reports.

Mice were fed a high-fat diet with 60% of calories coming from fats, or a regular diet with 5.3% of calories from fats and 54% from carbohydrates. Although some weight gain was seen, it was modest, and in female mice only; fasting glucose levels were unaffected. The high-fat diet mice, however, showed “robust mechanical allodynia” and “an increased percentage of capsaicin-responsive neurons”
 

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Other Categories:

• allodynia

• diet

• inflammation

• research/study