Chronic pain management in aged mice via transcranial focused ultrasound

Chronic pain is a pervasive, silent disability that can be difficult to treat. Treating this pain with opioid prescriptions can require multiple doctor visits and come with a risk of addiction, and deep-brain stimulation, which involves implanting electrodes into the brain, is an invasive surgical procedure.

Advances in low-intensity transcranial focused ultrasound (tFUS) have allowed for non-invasive pain modulation via a wearable headpiece, but many of the studies have focused on younger patients.

Kim et al. investigated the effects of tFUS on senior subjects using a humanized mouse model. tFUS allows for very specific targeting of brain regions, and the researchers used it to stimulate the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) and agranular insular (AI).

The authors developed a battery powered, low-cost ultrasound analog front end that was tested on female rodents and compared to a commercial transmitter. They chose to experiment with female rodents, due to previous studies that showed older women reported more intense pain than older men.

They observed that simultaneous modulation of the two areas could suppress pain hypersensitivity, which could be observed by a decrease in pain behaviors by the elderly mice.

“We also found that when we stimulated the AI only, or the S1, the improvement in pain modulation was not significant,” said author Bin He. “That suggests that multi-foci stimulation helps a lot, in this case, with senior subjects.”

The first human study on tFUS was published in this century, making it a relatively new field. However, the precision of tFUS stimulation in the brain makes it a promising candidate in the field of pain management.

Source: “Analgesic effect of simultaneously targeting multiple pain processing brain circuits in an aged humanized mouse model of chronic pain by transcranial focused ultrasound,” by Min Gon Kim, Chih-Yu Yeh, Kai Yu, Zherui Li, Kalpna Gupta, and Bin He, APL Bioengineering (2025). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0236108 .

This paper is part of the Bioengineering of the Brain Collection, learn more here .