Neurobehavioral Assessments of Intracerebral Hemorrhage - Animal Models of Acute Neurological Injuries: Injury and Mechanistic Assessments - page 645

deprivation procedures that can confound the functional outcomes
( 9, 10 ). The assessment of cognitive outcomes after striatal ICH
using the open fi eld, t-maze, water maze, radial arm maze, and
elevated plus maze, have yielded several positive, yet contradictory
outcomes, and may requisite a more global brain injury for cogni-
tive dysfunction, compared to the focal injury from striatal ICH
( 11, 12 ). In addition, there have been described several reasonable
neuro-scoring systems for rodent ICH ( 13-15 ). However, the
high subjectivity of these ordinal measures, can lead to quite large
interrater variability, and this can limit the generalizability of results
from one study to the next.
The most extensively used and well-established neurobehav-
ioral assessments for evaluating rodent striatal function after ICH
are, “forelimb use asymmetry,” “corner turning,” and “forelimb
placing.” The triad was fi rst described for use with the autologous
blood injection model in rats ( 16 ), but has also been demonstrated
as effective for the collagenase model ( 11, 17, 18 ), and applied to
gauge recovery in mice as well ( 19-21 ). In comparison with
other neurobehavioral tests, the major strengths of these tests are
(1) ease of assessment and low cost, (2) objective analysis with high
interrater reliability, (3) reliably distinguishes between ranges of
brain injury, (4) not confounded by learning with repeated testing,
(5) does not require animal pretraining before ICH induction
(nonskilled) and, (6) does not require aversive motivations like
food or water deprivation procedures ( 7, 16, 22 ). The following
chapters describe the unique features, and provide detailed and
practical procedures for performing these assessments.

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