Neurological and neurobehavioral assessment of experimental subarachnoid hemorrhage

Hyojin Jeon1, Jinglu Ai, Mohamed Sabri

  • 1Division of Neurosurgery, St. Michael's Hospital, Keenan Research Centre in the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute of St. Michael's Hospital and Department of Surgery, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. estherhj.jeon@utoronto.ca

BMC Neuroscience
|August 27, 2009
PubMed

About 50% of humans with aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) die and many survivors have neurological and neurobehavioral dysfunction. Animal studies usually focused on cerebral vasospasm and sometimes neuronal injury. The difference in endpoints may contribute to lack of translation of treatments effective in animals to humans. We reviewed prior animal studies of SAH to determine what neurological and neurobehavioral endpoints had been used, whether they differentiated between appropriate controls and animals with SAH, whether treatment effects were reported and whether they correlated with vasospasm. Only a few studies in rats examined learning and memory. It is concluded that more studies are needed to fully characterize neurobehavioral performance in animals with SAH and assess effects of treatment.