Abstract

Nurcan Bektas*, Dilara Nemutlu, Gamze Ulugbay, Rana Arslan

ABSTRACT

Pain is an unpleasant experience comes along with any kind of damage and effects daily routine negatively. Although there are various drugs, many of them could not completely succeed in relieving pain due to pain modulation is a complex process involving numerous mediators and receptors. Therefore, it is a rational approach to identifying the components involved in this complex process and develop new agents act on these components. In this respect, the involvement of muscarinic receptors in pain modulation has drawn attention in recent years. The aim of the review is to exhibit the involvement of the muscarinic receptor subtypes that contribute to pain modulation. The search strategy was performed with MeSH terms and free text words, using the bibliographic databases Science Direct and PubMed. The articles have been collected from the experimental animal studies. It is obvious that muscarinic receptors that are located in both peripheral and central areas are extensively involved in the pain process, besides the regional effectiveness of these receptors and their subtypes may vary. Since the muscarinic receptors are various and involve in many physiologic processes, the possibility of adverse effects is a problem in their clinical use. Thus, determining the receptor specificity is an important issue to understand what types of muscarinic receptors involve in pain modulation and to develop new drugs. The agonists of muscarinic receptors are promising for relieving pain although there are lots of unanswered questions.