Alcohol can increase the sensitivity to painful stimulation or convert insensibility to pain at different stages. We hypothesized that chronic alcohol consumption changes the level of LVV-hemorphin-7 (abbreviated as LVV-H7, an opioid-like peptide generated from hemoglobin β-chain), thereby affecting pain sensation. We established a chronic alcohol-exposed rat model to investigate the effects of LVV-H7. Adult male Sprague-Dawley rats were subjected to daily intraperitoneal injection of 10 % ethanol (w/v) at 0.5 g/kg for 15 days and subsequent alcohol withdrawal for 5 days. Using different pharmacological strategies to affect the LVV-H7 level, we investigated the correlation between LVV-H7 and pain-related behavior. Tail-flick and hot plate tests were employed to investigate alcohol-induced pain-related behavioral changes. The serum level of LVV-H7 was determined by ELISA. Our results showed that alcohol first induced an analgesia followed by a hyperalgesia during alcohol withdrawal, which could be driven by the quantitative change of LVV-H7. A positive correlation between the level of LVV-H7 and Δtail-flick latency (measured latency minus basal latency) confirmed this finding. Moreover, we revealed that the LVV-H7 levels were determined by the activity of cathepsin D and red blood cell/hemoglobin counts, which could be affected by alcohol. These results suggest that the deterioration of anti-nociception induced by alcohol is correlated to the decreased level of LVV-H7, and this could be due to alcohol-induced anemia. This study may help to develop LVV-H7 structure-based novel analgesics for treating alcohol-induced pain disorders and thus ameliorate the complications in alcoholics.
Keywords: Alcohol; Alcohol withdrawal; Anemia; LVV-hemorphin-7; Pain.
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