Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 6
Experimental Traumatic Spinal Cord Injury
Zübeyde Erbayraktar , Necati Gökmen , Osman Yılmaz ,
and Serhat Erbayraktar
Abstract
Animal models are important to develope therapies for individuals suffering from spinal cord injuries. For
this purpose, rats are commonly preferred. In sharp injury models, spinal cord is completely or incom-
pletely cut to assess axonal regeneration. On the other hand, spinal cord is compressed or contused to
mimic the human injury in blunt injury models for understanding as well as managing the secondary
pathophysiologic processes following injury. Especially, contusions are thought to be biomechanically
similar to vertebral fractures and/or dislocations and thus provide the most realistic experimental setting
in which to test potential neuroprotective and regenerative strategies.
Key words
Spinal cord contusion, Spinal cord injury, Spinal cord transection
1
Introduction
Experimental models of central nervous system (CNS) injury have
been indispensable in the exploration of pathological mechanisms
and treatment strategies. Due to the variable nature of clinical trau-
matic CNS injury (e.g., inconsistencies in the anatomical location
of impact and the magnitude and duration of loading), experimen-
tal models must simplify the human condition in order to induce a
reproducible injury that can be utilized for experimental testing.
Models have enlisted a large variety of animal species (
1
) and have
applied a broad spectrum of injury paradigms ranging from transec-
tions (
2
) to contusions (
3, 4
). Rat and mouse are the most popular
animals used in such models, both because of cost and accessibility
and because of the latter's transgenic potential (
5
). In vivo animal
models allow the investigator to experimentally manipulate certain
parameters that are not possible in patients and provide a more
complete representation of the human spinal cord because they
more closely mimic the material properties and anatomical archi-
tecture. Therefore, the load distribution and structural failure in
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