Changes in cerebral vascular reactivity following mild repetitive head injury in awake rats: modeling the human experience

The changes in brain function in response to mild head injury are usually subtle and go undetected. Physiological biomarkers would aid in the early diagnosis of mild head injury. In this study we used hypercapnia to follow changes in cerebral vascular reactivity after repetitive mild head injury. We...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Experimental brain research 2024-10, Vol.242 (10), p.2433-2442
Main Authors: Bens, Nicole, Kulkarni, Praveen, Ferris, Craig F.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Anesthesia
Animals
Basal ganglia
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Biomedicine
Brain - diagnostic imaging
Brain - physiopathology
Brain injury
Brain stem
Carbon dioxide
Cerebellum
Cerebrovascular Circulation - physiology
Cortex (olfactory)
Disease Models, Animal
Early experience
Head
Head injuries
Hypercapnia
Hypercapnia - physiopathology
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Male
Neuroimaging
Neurology
Neurosciences
Olfactory system
Oxygen - blood
Prefrontal cortex
Rats
Rats, Sprague-Dawley
Research Article
Somatosensory cortex
Wakefulness - physiology
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Summary:The changes in brain function in response to mild head injury are usually subtle and go undetected. Physiological biomarkers would aid in the early diagnosis of mild head injury. In this study we used hypercapnia to follow changes in cerebral vascular reactivity after repetitive mild head injury. We hypothesized head injury would reduce vascular reactivity. Rats were maintained on a reverse light-dark cycle and head impacted daily at 24 h intervals over three days. All head impacts were delivered while rats were fully awake under red light illumination. There was no neuroradiological evidence of brain damage. After the 3rd impact rats were exposed to 5% CO 2 and imaged for changes in BOLD signal. All imaging was done while rats were awake without the confound of anesthesia. The data were registered to a 3D MRI rat atlas with 171 segmented brain areas providing site specific information on vascular reactivity. The changes in vascular reactivity were not uniform across the brain. The prefrontal cortex, somatosensory cortex and basal ganglia showed the hypothesized decrease in vascular reactivity while the cerebellum, thalamus, brainstem, and olfactory system showed an increase in BOLD signal to hypercapnia.
ISSN:0014-4819
1432-1106
1432-1106
DOI:10.1007/s00221-024-06907-7