Duration of isoflurane-based surgical anesthesia determines severity of brain injury and neurological deficits after a transient focal ischemia in young adult rats.

Duration of isoflurane-based surgical anesthesia determines severity of brain injury and neurological deficits after a transient focal ischemia in young adult rats. Brain Res Bull. 2017 Jul 26;: Authors: Gaidhani N, Sun F, Schreihofer D, Uteshev VV Abstract Tremendous efforts and funds invested in discovery of novel drug treatments for ischemic stroke have so far failed to deliver clinically efficacious therapies. The reasons for these failures are not fully understood. An indiscriminate use of isoflurane-based surgical anesthesia with or without nitrous oxide may act as an unconstrained, untraceable source of data variability, potentially causing false-positive or false-negative results. To test this hypothesis, a common transient suture middle cerebral artery occlusion (tMCAO) model of ischemic stroke in young adult male rats was used to determine the impact of a typical range of anesthesia durations required for this model on data variability (i.e., infarct volume and neurological deficits). The animals were maintained on spontaneous ventilation. The study results indicated that: (1) Variable duration of isoflurane anesthesia prior, during and after tMCAO is a significant source of data variability as evidenced by measurements of infarct volume and neurological deficits; and (2) Severity of brain injury and neurological deficits after tMCAO is inversely related to the duration of isoflurane anesthesia: e.g., in our study, a 90min ...
Source: Brain Research Bulletin - Category: Neurology Authors: Tags: Brain Res Bull Source Type: research