Effect of Chronic Consumption of Powdered Tobacco (Snuff) on Pain Sensation in Mice

Pain may be defined as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience, associated with actual or potential tissue damage. The leaves have social and ethnomedical applications. Tobacco is used traditionally to treat arches, snake bites, bowel complains, convulsions, nervous ailment and to cure/heal the pain of toothache when chewed (Melson, 1944). Therefore this study was designed to investigate the effect of chronic consumption of powdered tobacco on pain sensation using two groups of Swiss mice (control and test) weighing 18g-28g (n=15 each).The control received 100g of normal rodent chow, while the test group received 1g of powdered tobacco in 99g of rodent chow per day. Water was given ad libitum while daily food and water intake, as well as body weight changes, were monitored during the 31-day study. The tail flick and formalin tests were used to assess pain sensation. The results showed that the latency of tail flick did not differ between the test and control group. However, in the formalin test, the frequency of paw attention in both phases of the test was significantly lower (P< 0.05, 0.01) compared to the control group. The duration and frequency of grooming (P