How does sunburn cause pain?
Everybody who has sat too long in the sun knows how painful sunburn can be, and how ineffective current treatments such as topical creams can be.
Research by John Dawes and colleagues at King’s College London & University College London has shed new light on how sunburn causes pain.
They investigated the inflammatory response associated with ultraviolet B radiation of the skin and found that the chemokine CXCL5 (also known as epithelial-derived neutrophil-activating peptide-78) mediates UVB irradiation-induced pain in the skin of rats.
The results, published in Science Translational Medicine (STM), suggest that CXCL5 mediates UVB irradiation-induced pain and may be a target for the development of new analgesics or pain killers.
