Intracranial Pressure Gradients Caused by Experimental Cerebral Ischemia and Edema • To assess the development and resolution of ischemic cerebral edema and brain swelling, measurements of intracranial pressure (ICP) were made in cats after the transorbital occlusion of one middle cerebral artery. Measurement of ICP gradients was difficult: epidural, subdural and intraventricular catheters caus...

IN THE PATIENT with completed stroke there are few specific management options. Once damage has been sustained, objectives are limited: patient survival, reduction of neurological deficit to a minimum, effective rehabilitation to realize the potential of brain compensatory mechanisms, and secondary prophylaxis in hopes of avoiding a further ictus. The physician's concern must be to minimize the...

Cerebrovascular events contribute to ~40% of preeclampsia/eclampsia-related deaths, and neurological symptoms are common among preeclamptic patients. We previously reported that placental ischemia, induced by reducing utero-placental perfusion pressure, leads to impaired myogenic reactivity and cerebral edema in the pregnant rat. Whether the impaired myogenic reactivity is associated with alter...

Osmotherapy is the cornerstone of medical management for cerebral edema associated with large ischemic strokes. We determined the effect of duration of graded increases in serum osmolality with mannitol and hypertonic saline (HS) on blood-brain barrier (BBB) disruption and regional cerebral edema in a well-characterized rat model of large ischemic stroke. Halothane-anesthetized adult male Wista...

BACKGROUND A rat model for neonatal hypoxic-ischemic brain damage (HIBD) was established to observe the effect of ischemic postconditioning (IPostC) on cerebral edema and the AQP4 expression following HIBD and to verify the neuroprotection of IPostC and the relationship between changes of AQP4 expression and cerebral edema. METHODS Water content was measured with dry-wet method, and AQP4 tran...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Abnormal expression of some matrix metalloproteinases (MMP) has shown to play a deleterious role in brain injury in experimental models of cerebral ischemia. We aimed to investigate MMP-2 (gelatinase A) and MMP-9 (gelatinase B) in brain parenchyma in both ischemic and hemorrhagic strokes. METHODS Postmortem fresh brain tissue from 6 ischemic and 8 hemorrhagic stroke pat...

Hypoxic/ischemic brain damage is well-known catastrophic injury. The specific treatment, socalled neuroprotective therapy, aims to prevent or diminish this havoc damage. However, approved neuroprotective therapy in clinical practice is limited. Targeted temperature management (TTM) shows the most promising neuroprotective therapy. Moreover, TTM is also useful for intracranial pressure (ICP) con...

Increased blood-brain barrier (BBB) Na-K-Cl cotransporter activity appears to contribute to cerebral edema formation during ischemic stroke. We have shown previously that inhibition of BBB Na-K-Cl cotransporter activity reduces edema and infarct in the rat middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) model of ischemic stroke. We have also shown that the BBB cotransporter is stimulated by the ischemi...