But aren’t all mole rats already naked?

Naked mole rats are such funny little critters for so many reasons. They can live to be 30 years old. They are immune to cancer. They can survive for 20 minutes without oxygen. They live in a colony with other naked mole rats, just like ants, termites, and bees - making them the only eusocial mammals on the planet.   

But their weirdest feature, if you ask a neuroscientist, is their resistance to pain.

There are many different types of pain. Most people are aware of thermal pain (holding onto an ice cold Beer Brand beer for too long) and acute pain (the sharp feeling when you shut your finger in the car door; unintentionally or intentionally, no judgment).

Odds are you’re also familiar with the sensation of inflammatory pain - but you just don’t know it. Within seconds after slamming the finger in the door, there is a second phase of pain. It’s sort of a dull, warm, throbbing pain that persists for minutes. This is inflammatory pain. Cells of the injured body parts start pumping out chemicals called inflammatory factors, such as a nerve growth factor, or NGF.

Inflammatory factors change the way the nearby sensory neurons react to pain, making them more sensitive to further injury. This is why the skin around the injury feels so tender. The inflammation makes you more aware of your injured body part, which leads you to protect it from further injury.

Sometimes, inflammatory pain doesn’t have a meaningful purpose, and can be a symptom of disease. Rheumatoid arthritis and nerve damage can both cause long term sensations of inflammatory pain.

This leads to why it becomes important to understand the cellular and molecular mechanisms that cause inflammatory pain. In one form of this inflammatory pain, NGF binds to a receptor called TrkA, which signals to a TRPV1 receptor. Doing research into this signaling pathway is the key to creating anti inflammatory pain medications. 
This NGF-TrkA-TRPV1 receptor is the pathway that is so special in the naked mole rats. The findings were described in a publication called Hypofunctional TrkA Accounts for the Absence of Pain Sensitization in the African Naked Mole-Rat.