Who cares about naked mole-rats? Just like the name, the appearance of these creatures are neither charming nor appealing. Most people have known this type of rodent as hideous creatures thats not really special.
Naked mole-rats Image from Science Daily
Who cares about these rats and why would they be? Well, Thomas Park of University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) does and maybe a lot more people should start giving more attention and interest in these rats. A new study explores a way to use a characteristics of these rodents to help pain relief in humans or other mammals.
The naked mole-rats carry a very unique set of characteristics. They are the only mammals that are cold-blooded and they have very slow metabolism. What’s really interesting is that they can easily tolerate and roam in places with toxic levels of carbon dioxide or other mammals. Their natural habitats are underground tunnels and burrows where a lot of these rats are tightly packed together and as a result, the carbon dioxide levels quickly builds up, reaching a point where no other mammals, especially humans can tolerate. These creatures, however, could care less, since they are resistant to hypoxia, meaning that they can survive a condition with very little oxygen reaching brain and tissue cells. They can even stay in a condition where there is no oxygen for more than 30 minutes. This is an intriguing fact, considering that they are mammals just like humans.
The research is being done to discover a way to use this characteristics to relieve pain in human. Basically in humans and other most types of mammals, pain is derived from acidification of the injured tissues and since these mole-rats do not feel pain from acidic conditions produced by high carbon dioxide levels, they can be the source of alleviating pain for humans as well. In the experiment Park conducted, where the naked mole-rats were put in cages where some parts of the cages were highly acidic, the rats showed no sign of discomfort in the parts where rats, mice and other species of mole-rats quickly ran off from. No activity of the nerve fibres stimulating the physical and behavioural activity to protect the organism from brain or tissue damage was found.
Not only do these mole-rats potentially hold the key to pain relief, they might also hold clues to preventing brain damage in humans while very little oxygen is carried to the brain, such as during stroke or heart attack. Although there has not been a great way to finding such methods from these naked mole-rats, innovative medicinal improvements would be created to alleviate the pain of the injured and preventing major brain damage during heart attack.
Mokhan Kim
