Description:

Dr. Liu is the director of Pain Research Center of Sun Yat-sen University. His presentation is entitled, "The Cytokine Microenvironment Hypothesis of Chronic Pain."

His research focused on the peripheral and central mechanisms of chronic pain and published more than 70 papers. In 1995 he discovered long-term potentiation (LTP) at C-fiber synapses in spinal dorsal horn, which is now investigated as a synaptic model of pathological pain in many laboratories in the world.

In recent years he has studied how activated glial cells and over-expression of cytokines lead to chronic pain, memory deficits and depression. He found that following peripheral nerve injury over-expression of TNF-α leads to neuropathic pain by regulation of ion channels，including voltage-gated sodium channels and chloride channels in dorsal root ganglia neurons and enhancement of excitatory synaptic connection in spinal dorsal horn. TNF-α also produces working memory deficit by dysfunction of hippocampus.