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Updated: Jul 19, 2026
A Pediatric Concussion Model in Mice: Closed Head Injury with Long-Term Disorders (CHILD)
Published on: February 7, 2025
Computational studies of strain exposures in neonate and mature rat brains during closed head impact
Anna Levchakov1, Eran Linder-Ganz, Ramesh Raghupathi
1Department of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv Campus, Tel Aviv, Israel.
Insights
Neonatal rat brains experience higher stress and strain during traumatic brain injury (TBI) compared to adult brains. This is due to their smaller size and stiffer brain tissue, making infant brains more susceptible to TBI.
Area of Science:
- Biomedical Engineering
- Neuroscience
- Pediatric Traumatology
Background:
- Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a leading cause of childhood mortality.
- Current animal models of TBI often overlook age-related differences in brain tissue properties.
- This oversight may bias experimental results when comparing TBI effects across different animal ages.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate age-specific biomechanical responses of rat brains to closed head injury.
- To compare strain and stress distributions in neonatal versus mature rat brains.
- To inform the design of TBI experiments considering age as a factor.
Main Methods:
- Development of age-specific finite element (FE) models for neonatal and mature rat brains.
- Simulation of closed head injury scenarios using these FE models.
- Analysis of strain and stress distributions under identical cortical displacements.
Main Results:
- Neonatal rat brains exhibit larger peak stress and strain magnitudes for equivalent cortical displacements compared to mature brains.
- Smaller brain size and stiffer tissue properties contribute to increased injury susceptibility in neonates.
- A greater brain volume in neonates is subjected to significant strain levels.
Conclusions:
- Finite element simulations reveal that neonatal brains are more vulnerable to TBI due to biomechanical factors.
- Findings support the hypothesis that infant brains are more susceptible to TBI due to their size and tissue properties.
- This study provides crucial data for designing more accurate TBI experiments that account for age-related differences.
Abstract:
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is the most common cause of death in childhood, and the majority of fatal cases are due to motor vehicle accidents, falls, sport-related accidents, and child abuse. Rodents and particularly rats became a commonly used animal model of TBI in childhood as well as in adults, and different techniques are described in the literature to induce the brain injury. However, findings reported in the last decade regarding the increased stiffness of brain tissue in young animals, including rats, are not considered in experimental designs of TBI studies, and this may seriously bias the results when TBI effects are compared across different animal ages. In this study, we determined the strain and stress distributions in neonatal (post-natal-day [PND] 13-17) and mature (PND 43 and 90) rat brains during a closed head injury, using age-specific finite element (FE) models. The FE simulations indicated that for identical cortical displacements, the neonatal brain may be exposed to larger peak stress magnitudes compared with a mature brain due to stiffer tissue properties in the neonate, as well as larger strain magnitudes due to its smaller size. The brain volume subjected to a certain strain level was greater in the neonate brain compared with the adult models for all indentation depths greater than 1 mm. In conclusion, our present findings allow better design of closed head impact experiments which involve an age factor. Additionally, the larger peak stresses and larger strain volumetric exposures observed in the neonatal brain support the hypothesis that the smaller size and stiffer tissue of the infant brain makes it more susceptible to TBI.
