Giada Amodeo

University of Milan | UNIMI · Department of Pharmacological and Biomolecular Sciences

Knee osteoarthritis is a common cause of pain and disability in old subjects. Pain may predispose to the development of frailty. Studies on mechanisms underlying pain in osteoarthritis models during aging are lacking. In this work, we used the monosodium iodoacetate model of osteoarthritis in adult (11-week-old) and old (20-month-old) C57BL/6J mice...

Chemotherapy-induced neuropathy (CIN) is a major adverse effect associated with many chemotherapeutics, including bortezomib (BTZ). Several mechanisms are involved in CIN, and recently a role has been proposed for prokineticins (PKs), a chemokine family that induces proinflammatory/pro-algogen mediator release and drives the epigenetic control of g...

The hypothesis that pain can predispose to frailty development has been recently investigated in several clinical studies suggesting that frailty and pain may share some mechanisms. Both pain and frailty represent important clinical and social problems and both lack a successful treatment. This circumstance is mainly due to the absence of in-depth...

The development of neuropathy and of mood alterations is frequent after chemotherapy. These complications, independent from the antitumoral mechanism, are interconnected due to an overlapping in their processing pathways and a common neuroinflammatory condition. This study aims to verify whether in mice the treatment with the proteasome inhibitor b...

Objective Treatment of pain associated with osteoarthritis (OA) is unsatisfactory and innovative approaches are needed. The secretome from human adipose-derived mesenchymal stem cells (hASC-Conditioned Medium, CM) has been successfully used to relieve painful symptoms in models of chronic pain. The aim of this study was to explore the efficacy of t...

Neurotoxicity is a common side effect of chemotherapeutics that often leads to the development of chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy (CIPN). The peptide Prokineticin 2 (PK2) has a key role in experimental models of CIPN and can be considered an insult-inducible endangering mediator. Since primary afferent sensory neurons are highly sensitiv...

Suppression of the immune system has been constantly reported in the last years as a classical side effect of opioid drugs. Most of the studies on the immunological properties of opioids refer to morphine. Although morphine remains the “reference molecule,” other semisynthetic and synthetic opioids are frequently used in the clinical practice. The...

Vincristine (VCR) treatment is often associated to painful neuropathy. Its development is independent from antitumoral mechanism and involves neuroinflammation. We investigated the role of the chemokine prokineticin (PK)2 in a mouse model of VCR induced neuropathy using a PK-receptors (PK-R) antagonist to counteract its development. We also evaluat...

Background Neuropathy is a dose-limiting side effect of many chemotherapeutics, including bortezomib. The mechanisms underlying this condition are not fully elucidated even if a contribution of neuroinflammation was suggested. Here, we investigated the role of a chemokine family, the prokineticins (PKs), in the development of bortezomib-induced per...

Introduction Impaired immune function during the perioperative period may be associated with worse short- and long-term outcomes. Morphine is considered a major contributor to immune modulation. Patients and methods We performed a pilot study to investigate postoperative immune function by analyzing peripheral blood mononuclear cells’ functionalit...

Painful neuropathy is one of the complications of diabetes mellitus that adversely affects patients'quality of life. Pharmacological treatments are not fully satisfactory, and novel approaches needed. In a preclinical mouse model of diabetes the effect of both human mesenchymal stromal cells from adipose tissue (hASC) and their conditioned medium (...

Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are frequently used to treat migraine, but the mechanisms of their effects in this pathology are not fully elucidated. The trigeminal ganglia and calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) have been implicated in the pathophysiology of migraine. The release of CGRP and prostaglandin E 2 (PGE 2 ) from freshl...

The aim of this study was to evaluate substance P (SP) levels and the effect of a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID), ketoprofen, on SP in the pericoronal gingival tissue after extraction of upper third molars. A sample of 20 young non-smoking systemically healthy adults of both sexes, with a healthy upper third molar to extract for ortho...

Background: Opioid drugs affect immunity, but not all opioid drugs share the same immunomodulatory properties. Tapentadol is an analgesic drug with a dual synergistic mechanism of action: µ-opioid receptor agonism and noradrenaline reuptake inhibition. Weaker µ-opioid receptor agonism combined with noradrenaline reuptake inhibition results in pote...

Objectives. To evaluate substance P (SP) and the effect of ketoprofen administration, a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID), on SP in the pulp of upper third molars with experimentally induced pulpal lesion. Materials and Methods. A sample of 20 young systemically healthy adults of both sexes, nonsmokers, with a healthy upper third molar to...

Neuropathic pain is a severe diabetes complication and its treatment is not satisfactory. It is associated with neuroinflammation-related events that participate in pain generation and chronicization. Prokineticins are a new family of chemokines that has emerged as critical players in immune system, inflammation and pain. We investigated the role o...

Cannabis use is frequent among adolescents. Its main component, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), affects the immune system. We recently demonstrated that chronic exposure of adolescent mice to THC suppressed immunity immediately after treatment but that after a washout period THC induced a long-lasting opposite modulation towards a proinflammato...

Neuropathic pain (NP) is a highly invalidating disease resulting as consequence of a lesion or disease affecting the somatosensory system. All the pharmacological treatments today in use give a long lasting pain relief only in a limited percentage of patients before pain reappears making NP an incurable disease. New approaches are therefore needed...