Introduction: Nitric oxide seems to play a dual role in ischemia/reperfusion injury. Few studies have investigated whether it exacerbates or improves brain edema. In the present study, we inhibited the activity of nitric oxide synthase by L-NAME and evaluated the cerebral infarct volume, tissue swelling and brain edema, alongside the measurement of blood flow of the ischemic region. Methods...

Endogenous cannabinoid signaling pathways have been implicated in protection of the brain from hypoxia, ischemia, and trauma, but the mechanism for these protective effects is uncertain. We found that in CB1 cannabinoid receptor knock-out mice, mortality from permanent focal cerebral ischemia was increased, infarct size and neurological deficits after transient focal cerebral ischemia were more...

Therapeutic (induced) hypothermia (TH) has been extensively studied as a means to reduce brain injury following global and focal cerebral ischemia, intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH), and subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH). Here, we briefly review the clinical and experimental evidence supporting the use of TH in each condition. We emphasize the importance of systematically evaluating treatment paramete...

Preconditioning the rat brain with spreading depression for 48 h induces potent ischemic tolerance (infarct tolerance) after an interval of 12-15 days, consequently reducing the infarcted lesion size in the acute phase following focal cerebral ischemia. However, persistence of the morphological and functional neuroprotection has not yet been proven. We tested whether tolerance-derived neuroprot...

Background: Central renin angiotensin system has an important role on the cerebral microcirculation and metabolism. Our previous work showed that inhibition of angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE) activity prior to induction of ischemia protected the brain from severe ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) injuries. This study evaluated the impacts of post-ischemic inhibition of ACE, enalapril, on brain inf...

objective: morphological changes of ca1 neurons in rat hippocampus after transient and permanent focal cerebral ischemia were studied to clarify the nature of postischemic cell death in the subfield. materials and methods: male adult rats were divided into 3 groups: control (shamoperated), transient ischemic group (30 minutes of mcao followed by 48 hours of reperfusion), and permanent ischemic ...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Studies show that blocking the activation of caspases by the caspase inhibitors z-VAD.FMK and z-DEVD.FMK can reduce ischemic neuronal injury after cerebral ischemia. Because the severity of ischemia was mild in some studies, we tested the efficacy of these caspase inhibitors on moderately severe but transient forebrain and focal ischemic insults in the rat. METHODS Vari...

In this study, we hypothesized that total flavonoid of Litsea coreana leve (TFLC) protects against focal cerebral ischemia/reperfusion injury. TFLC (25, 50, 100 mg/kg) was administered orally to a rat model of focal ischemia/reperfusion injury, while the free radical scavenging agent, edaravone, was used as a positive control drug. Results of neurological deficit scoring, 2,3,5-triphenyl tetraz...

It has been shown recently that matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) are elevated after cerebral ischemia. In the current study, we investigated the pathophysiologic role for MMP-9 (gelatinase B, EC.3.4.24.35) in a mouse model of permanent focal cerebral ischemia, using a combination of genetic and pharmacologic approaches. Zymography and Western blot analysis demonstrated that MMP-9 protein levels...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Our previous study has demonstrated that the rapid tolerance to cerebral ischemia by electroacupuncture (EA) pretreatment was possibly mediated through an endocannabinoid system-related mechanism. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether activation of epsilon protein kinase C (εPKC) was involved in EA pretreatment-induced neuroprotection via cannabinoid recept...