Stroke Induces a BDNF-Dependent Improvement in Cognitive Flexibility in Aged Mice.

Stroke Induces a BDNF-Dependent Improvement in Cognitive Flexibility in Aged Mice. Neural Plast. 2019;2019:1460890 Authors: Houlton J, Zhou LYY, Barwick D, Gowing EK, Clarkson AN Abstract Stroke remains a leading cause of disability worldwide. Recently, we have established an animal model of stroke that results in delayed impairment in spatial memory, allowing us to better investigate cognitive deficits. Young and aged brains show different recovery profiles after stroke; therefore, we assessed aged-related differences in poststroke cognition. As neurotrophic support diminishes with age, we also investigated the involvement of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) in these differences. Young (3-6 months old) and aged (16-21 months old) mice were trained in operant touchscreen chambers to complete a visual pairwise discrimination (VD) task. Stroke or sham surgery was induced using the photothrombotic model to induce a bilateral prefrontal cortex stroke. Five days poststroke, an additional cohort of aged stroke animals were treated with intracerebral hydrogels loaded with the BDNF decoy, TrkB-Fc. Following treatment, animals underwent the reversal and rereversal task to identify stroke-induced cognitive deficits at days 17 and 37 poststroke, respectively. Assessment of sham animals using Cox regression and log-rank analyses showed aged mice exhibit an increased impairment on VD reversal and rereversal learning compared to young cont...
Source: Neural Plasticity - Category: Neurology Authors: Tags: Neural Plast Source Type: research