Department of Dental Anesthesiology

　The dental anesthesiology is one of the clinical science based on the physiology and pharmacology, so the wide knowledge beyond the dentistry are quite needed. Therefore, we investigate subjects across the spectrum from basic to clinical research.

Professor	Hitoshi NIWA
Associate Professor	Chiho KUDO
Associate Professor	Hiroshi HANAMOTO
Associate Professor	Hiroharu MAEGAWA
Assistant Professor	Chizuko YOKOE
Assistant Professor	Fumi KOZU

Migraine is a common condition observed in approximately 10 % of the population in Japan. The clinical characteristics of migraine are the unilateral and pulsating severe headache lasting for 4-72 hours, and sometimes associated with nausea, vomiting, photophobia and phonophobia. Migraine patients sometimes complain of the tooth or facial pain during the attack. CSD, which is an observationally-defined, slowly propagating wave of neuronal and glial depolarization, that develops within brain areas such as cerebral cortex, cerebellum or hippocampus, has been reported as one of the possible mechanisms of the migraine. It has been reported that CSD can activate the trigeminal sensory systems that innervates to the orofacial area, and presumably lead to migraine headache. Our group focuses on CSD and tries to elucidate the mechanism of the migraine from various respects using the CSD animal models.

PD is associated with pain symptoms as well as movement disorder such as muscular rigidity and bradykinesia. However, it is unclear how PD modifies pain perception. Our group assessed whether pain threshold in oral region could be influenced in the 6-hydroxydopamine (6-OHDA) treated rat, which has been widely used as a PD animal model, by the formalin test, the immunohistochemistry of c-fos expression and found that PD rat showed hypersensitivity to pain. We are currently investigating the mechanism.

Neuropathic pain is known to be intractable compared to nociceptive pain. Neuropathic pain is also treated in dentistry. This is because neuropathic pain is also caused by dental treatment and tooth extraction. For the treatment of neuropathic pain, drugs with mechanisms of action different from those of existing drugs are required. We use neuropathic pain model animals to elucidate the pathophysiology of neuropathic pain and conduct research aimed at alleviating symptoms. Recently, we reported that dopamine D2 receptor agonists and anti-CGRP antibodies are involved in the alleviation of neuropathic pain.