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Opioid addiction represents a major health crisis, affecting an estimated 1.7 million people in the United states alone. In 2017, almost 50,000 people died of opioid overdoses. An important link exists between opioids and pain, but the exact nature of this relationship is unclear. One important piece of information for understanding the relationship between pain and opioid abuse is information about how peripheral signals for pain comes to affect parts of the brain that are typically involved in emotions and motivation. It is through these brain structures that chronic pain and the stress or even depression that accompanies it might increase an individual’s risk to misuse or abuse opioids. An unexplored route by which pain signals might target the ‘limbic’ or emotional systems of the brain is through direct projections from the spinal cord to a portion of the brain known as the hypothalamus. These inputs from the spinal cord to lateral portions of the hypothalamus, including the lateral preoptic area, represent a direct connection between peripheral pain systems and neurons involved in reward processing and motivated behaviors, such as those in the ventral tegmental area. The long-term goal of this research is to determine how chronic pain may come to influence opioid use and opioid relapse via the lateral preoptic area. One step towards doing this is to understand how these areas are connected by studying their neuroanatomical connections. A second goal of the current project is to examine how the signaling of the neurons in this brain area changes across repeated exposure to pain.
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