Assessment of Analgesic Drug Treatment

In the last decade, attempts were increasingly made to “objectify” the subjective pain experience and the degree of the pharmacologically induced pain relief by electrophysiologically measurable variables in standardized and experimentally controlled pain models [1,13,14,15]. Like any other sensory sensation, pain is the result of changes in the neuronal activity of a highly specialized sensory system which can be measured with the established neurophysiological methods ([16,18,23] for review, see [2]). In the following, some results of our attempts to determine the efficacy of a variety of differently acting analgesic treatments in a standardized non-inflammatory pain model using healthy human subjects are presented. In this model, the nociceptive system is activated by short, standardized, intracutaneously applied electrical currents, and the analgesic potency is objectified by cerebral reactions to the pain-inducing stimuli.