神经生物学

Subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) is a devastating cerebrovascular disease, comprising 5% of all strokes and affecting 27,000 people in the USA annually. The acute changes in vascular physiology and morphology immediately following SAH are poorly understood, and likely contribute to e ...

There are numerous grading scales for subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) that are in use today. They attempt to subdivide patients into groups based on both clinical and radiographic findings. Some of the scales in common use include variables that account for the amount and location of hemorrha ...

Demyelination is the hallmark of some neurodegenerative autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis and Guillain–Barr� syndrome. To understand the mechanism of myelin degradation and monitor the outcome of remyelinating therapies, real-time visualization of myelin ch ...

Noninvasive neuroimaging provides the means to quantify various structural and physiological aspects of brain injury in intact animals. Different modalities are sensitive to lesion volume, metabolism, axonal connectivity, blood–brain barrier status, and hemorrhage. Mor ...

In order to model human neuropathological anxiety in rodents, a wide variety of behavioral testing paradigms in animal were developed. These animal experiments are used to screen novel compounds with anxiolytic or anxiogenic activity. In Section 1, we describe and discuss commonly used a ...

The behavioral tests described in this chapter provide a relatively comprehensive characterization of cognitive and/or sensorimotor deficits in various rodent models of human neuropathology. Sensorimotor coordination (and unilateral deficits), general activity lev ...

Assessments for cognitive dysfunction in animal models of experimental brain injury are deigned to replicate the sequelae of behavioral impairments associated with traumatic brain injury (TBI) in clinic. TBI in humans results in a myriad of functional deficits. However, cognitive d ...

The combination of molecular manipulation of gene expression and behavior endpoint phenotypic analysis has uncovered numerous novel gene functions and provided unprecedented opportunities for new drug development. To facilitate investigation of diverse behavioral pr ...

Gene expression profiling of mRNA in the brain and the peripheral blood, is increasingly important to validate diagnostic and prognostic signatures of disease and prediction of outcome, as well as support pharmacogenomic approaches to novel treatment strategies. Variation of gene ...

Assays for proteolytic activity are often used to confirm a functional role for enzymes involved with CNS pathobiology. In studies focused on matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs), specifically those investigating the role of gelatinases (MMP-2, MMP-9), gelatin zymography is used to ass ...

In many neurobiological experiments, identifying the presence and/or quantitative change of specific proteins as well as their associating partners will contribute to the understanding of their chronological and physiological functions in the brain. Methods such as Western b ...

Ischemic and hemorrhagic stroke alters microRNA (miRNA) expression in animals and patients. The recent discovery of miRNAs as key regulators of gene function has introduced a new level and mechanism of gene regulation, with estimates that greater than one-third of all human genes may be regu ...

Brain ischemia and injuries often cause alterations in short- and long-term synaptic plasticity, which underlies impaired brain functions, such as learning and memory deficit and epilepsy. Field potential recording (FPR) and whole-cell patch clamp recording are electrophysio ...

Electrical activity is one of the major ways by which neurons communicate with each other. To understand how the brain works in physiological and pathological conditions, we need to know how the neuron works by monitoring the electrical activities of the neuron at different circumstances. M ...

Neurons within the central nervous system transmit information as a pulsed electrical code which is conducted down specialized processes (axons) that connect with other neurons. Each neuron can potentially connect with many other neurons and vice versa. At the sites of connections, inf ...

Stroke is the third leading cause of death and the number one cause of disability in the adult population in the USA. With an average of one victim every 40 s, almost 795,000 individuals experience a stroke every year. Over the past 30 years, substantial progress has been made in stroke prevention, diagnos ...

The term “gliosis” is generally defined as the cellular process by which glial cells in the CNS respond to insult and is used to describe the functional, morphological, biochemical, and molecular changes that occur in response to injury or disease. However, gliosis is most associated with the act ...

This chapter provides a crash course for those interested in how an object of interest or signal in the nervous system can be quantified and the volume or features of a brain region can be analyzed with systematic computation. This chapter does not attempt to provide theoretical derivation, nor exh ...

Cell death and cell survival are the fundamental events in development and pathological conditions associated with virtually all disorders in the central nervous system (CNS) and peripheral nervous system (PNS). Assessment of cell death and identification of the type of cell death are c ...

Histology is an essential technique to evaluate ischemic damage in the animal models. Histopathology often refers to the microscopic examination of pathological changes in the tissue. This chapter describes the procedure to prepare brain for histopathological evaluation. The b ...