Naked mole rats are one of the strangest mammals around. They can live up to 18 years, they never get cancer and as such unfortunately for them, quite appealing and very useful for medical research.
The latest discovery is again a proof of their extraordinarity, according to scientists they feel no pain from acid, which could be quite helpful when dealing with the pain of arthritis.
University of Rochester
Reason for not feeling the pain, like most animals when confronted with acid lies in so called nociceptors and the pain signals passing through. They found out that the pain signal that is passing through the sodium channels of nociceptors drops by 63 percent in mole rats and for comparison, the mice pain signal has dropped by 42 percent. With other words the pain signal becomes so weak that it doesn't make it to the pain receptors in brain and consequently mole rats feel no pain.
Mark Connor at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, who was not involved in the study agrees. "You could potentially develop a drug to bind to that site and reduce its activity to make people less sensitive to pain."
