Reference no: EM132408342

Tamara broke her right tibia and has undergone two surgeries to repair it. Although the bone has healed, she suffers increasing pain around the incision sites. Her diagnosis is postsurgical neuropathic pain. Pain medication has not helped. She is a second year nursing student and has done some reading to try to understand her problem and perhaps find a solution. She has found an article that says neuropathic pain may be caused by a decreased threshold for action potential generation in pain-detecting neurons. However, she has forgotten some of her physiology and needs some help in understanding what she is reading. She has logged into the "Ask a Nurse" chat line-and she got you!

1. Tamara wants to know how a decrease in threshold in pain-detecting neurons would affect their firing. Draw a graph (or any type of visual) of an intracellular recording of a neuron showing the response to a below-threshold and an above-threshold stimulus. Then, using this visual, show how decreasing the threshold could lead to additional action potentials.