Early Rehabilitation Does Not Reduce Impairment After Intra-striatal Hemorrhagic Stroke in Rats

Presenter

Britt Fedor, Neuroscience and Mental Health Institute, University of Alberta

Abstract

Intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) is a devastating stroke. Blood released into the brain’s parenchyma causes rapid mechanical damage, while initiating numerous secondary injury mechanisms, such as from toxic by-products of blood (clot) degradation. These events contribute to a protracted course of cell death after ICH, which has proven to be difficult to prevent with drug therapies. Remarkably, rehabilitative treatments (rehab) can mitigate much of that late cell death. One hypothesis suggests rehab helps accelerate the clearance of the old blood clot thereby minimizing neurotoxicity. Here, we manipulated enriched rehabilitation (ER) duration in the first month after moderate ICH to determine the impact on behavioural recovery and chronic cell death (60-day survival). We hypothesized that both rehab groups would perform better on measures of skilled reaching, and have smaller lesions compared to controls, but longer treatment would confer greater neuroprotective and behavioural benefits. Rats were randomly assigned to one of three groups: CONTROL, ER-10 days or ER-20 days. Animals were trained on a skilled reaching task, then received a collagenase induced striatal ICH. Animals in the ER10 and ER20 groups completed 10 or 20 days of ER. All animals completed pre-, mid-, and post-treatment assessments on a skilled reaching task. Behavioural data was analyzed to determine treatment effects. All animals displayed significant impairment following ICH. Interestingly, there was no significant difference in reaching ability at the mid- or post-treatment assessment (p>0.05), regardless of treatment condition. Histological analysis for assessment of lesion volume and white matter damage is currently in progress.

Poster

Authors & Affiliations

Brittany A. Fedor (Neuroscience and Mental Health Institute, University of Alberta), Anna J. Kalisvaart (Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, ), Shivani Ralhan (Department of Psychology, University of Alberta), Tiffany Kung (Neuroscience and Mental Health Institute, University of Alberta), Frederick Colbourne (Department of Psychology, University of Alberta; Neuroscience and Mental Health Institute, University of Alberta)

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