Strain differences in intraluminal thread model of middle cerebral artery occlusion in rats

Abstract

Stroke is despite of progressive improvements in treatment and reperfusion strategies one of the most devastating human pathology. However, as quality of acute health care improves and more people survive ischemic attack, healthcare specialists have to solve new challenges to preserve reasonable quality of life to these patients. Thus, novel approaches which prevents comorbidities of stroke and improve quality of life of stroke survivors in general has to be developed and experimentally tested. The aim of the present paper was to establish reliable rat model of middle cerebral occlusion and set of methods allowing selection of animals suitable for long-term experiments. We have compared mortality rates, cerebral blood flow and extension of ischemic lesion induced by intraluminal filament in three widely used outbred rat strains. We have additionally used an animal 18F-DG PET scans to verify its reliability in noninvasive detection of ischemic infarct in acute period (24 h after MCAO) for selecting animals eligible for long survival experiments. Our data clearly indicates that high variability between rat strains might negatively influence stroke induction by intraluminal thread occlusion of middle cerebral artery. Most reliable outbred rat strain in our hands was Sprague-Dawley where maximal reduction of cerebral blood flow and extensive ischemic lesion was observed. Contrary, Wistar rats exhibited higher mortality and Long-Evans rats significantly smaller or no ischemic region in comparison to Sprague-Dawley. Additionally, we have confirmed a positron emission tomography with 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose as suitable method to assess extension of ischemic region in acute period after the experimental arterial occlusion in rats.

Sulforaphane Ameliorates Metabolic Changes Associated With Status Epilepticus in Immature Rats

“…Fluorodeoxyglucose (18F-DG; ÚJV, Czech Republic) has been used in our experiments. Our team has expertise with 18F-DG use in small animals ( Svoboda et al, 2019 ). Animals were intravenously injected (jugular vein) with the selected dose of 18F-DG (10 – 15 MBq for PD12 and PD13 animals and 20–22 MBq for PD34 animals) dissolved in 0.2 or 0.4 (PD34) ml of saline, while shortly anaesthetized by isoflurane (ISF).…”

A Novel Improved Thromboembolism-Based Rat Stroke Model That Meets the Latest Standards in Preclinical Studies

“…This may be due to the fact that the structure of the middle cerebral artery in SD rats highly varies from one rat to another [ 21 , 32 ]. Nevertheless, previous studies on the FCI model using Long–Evans (LE) rats do not show any deviation or variability related to this rat strain [ 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 ]. We therefore chose to induce the ischemic stroke specifically in LE rats.…”

[18F]FDG/PET: a non-invasive technique for the study of stroke in murine and rat models

“…Several pre-clinical studies using mouse models of ischemic stroke have used [ 18 F]FDG/PET imaging as the primary technique to evaluate ischemic brain function and treatment efficacy. All research cited in this review on mouse models of ischemic stroke published between 2015 and 2022 found that the most commonly used mouse model was MCAO performed by intraluminal suturing [22,25,28,[30][31][32][33][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46]. In the context of the goal of the research, variations of this technique are used, such as.…”