Viscoelastic properties change at an early stage of Cuprizone induced affection of Oligodendrocytes in the Corpus Callosum of C57/black6 mice

Introduction Magnetic resonance elastography (MRE) is an innovative imaging technique developed to non-invasively map and quantify the viscoelastic properties of tissue in vivo. MRE has been used as a tool to image and assess human tissue properties in several areas of the body such as breast tissue, prostate and skeletal muscle and brain. As pathological alterations cause changes in elasticity and viscosity, MRE might well be applied to characterize the structural integrity of a given tissue and could be employed for diagnosis and clinical monitoring of neurodegenerative diseases such as multiple sclerosis. Therefore it appears to be essential to evaluate the effect of pathological processes occurring in multiple sclerosis, as there are neuronal and axonal degeneration, demyelination and incomplete remyelination, on the viscoelastic properties of cerebral tissue with the help of experimental rodent models. Thus, we introduced the cuprizone (CPZ) mouse-model which depicts key features of multiple sclerosis, namely demyelination and reactive gliosis. The feeding of the neurotoxicant CPZ to a group of C57/black6 mice induces transient demyelination of the murine central nervous system, mimicking the myelin damage and loss caused by neuroinflammation.