Bone Abstracts

Bone pain is a common symptom of both malignant and non-malignant bone disease. Bone pain is often the first sign of metastatic spread in patients suffering from breast, lung or prostate cancer. Cancer-induced bone pain is one of the most difficult of all persistent pain states to fully control, and it severely affects the quality of life of the patients.

Bone pain is also a common symptom of non-malignant metabolic bone diseases such as osteomalacia, fibrous dysplasia and Paget’s disease. Despite its clinical importance, the pain states are often poorly characterized clinically and the patho-physiological mechanisms of bone pain are not well understood. Most of the research efforts towards uncovering the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying bone pain have focused on cancer-induced bone pain. Even though nerve damage and inflammation are present in metastatic bone disease, the mechanisms of cancer–induced bone pain seem to be distinct from those of neuropathic and inflammatory pain, and it is likely that the cancer-bone microenvironment contributes to create what might be a unique pain state.

Human and animal models of experimentally evoked bone-associated pain and the patho-physiology of bone pain will be discussed.