The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of cortical spreading depression on neuronal activity in the rat motor (M1) cortex. It is known that cortical spreading depression causes widespread neuronal and glial activity in the cortex, but the degree to which it exerts its effects is unclear. Cortical spreading depression was induced in eight Sprague-Dawley male rats. After two hours, animals were euthanized and immunohistochemistry was performed on the brain to stain for the presence of c-Fos, an immediate early gene that is a well-known marker of neuronal activity. Sections were counterstained for Nissl substance to reveal two populations of cells: Nissl-stained neurons that were c-Fos positive, activated cells and Nissl-stained neurons that were c-Fos negative, non-activated cells. Three sections for each animal were examined and 20-30% of the total M1 cortex was analyzed. Cells were counted using systematic random sampling for each of the six cortical layers.
Our results show that the cortical spreading depression did not produce an activation of all neurons. When layers were individually examined, there was a main effect of layer on neuronal activation. This confirmed previous findings that cortical spreading depression had the strongest effect on superficial layers of the cortex
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/16809 |
| Date | 17 June 2016 |
| Creators | Bazarian, Alina |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
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