Sammanfattning
Chronic pain undermines the health and welfare of patients and carries huge financial costs. Patients who have suffered from disease or nerve injury show profound inter-individual variability in neuropathic pain even when the precipitating injury is nearly identical. Individual variability in the burden of pain has traditionally been attributed to psychosocial factors, but new data indicate that there is an important heritable predisposition to pain. Pain susceptibility genes are however intrinsically hard to detect in human lineages and populations, due to the extremely complex trait. We here report recent advances in the identification of contributing pain-related genetic variants. We also discuss the fact that dramatic variability in pain behavior is observed across inbred strains of mice, where it has been attributed to genetic polymorphisms. Identification of cellular correlates of pain variability across strains can advance the understanding of underlying pain mechanisms.