Traumatic brain injury (TBI) accounts for 50% of all trauma-related deaths. Neural stem/progenitor cells have been shown to mediate motor and cognitive functional recovery when transplanted intracerebrally after TBI. In this study, the researchers hypothesized that the transplanted neural stem cells would remain near the area of injury and improve motor and cognitive functional recovery.
The researchers used a controlled cortical impact (CCI) device to administer an injury to the brain of the rats. The CCI device is incredibly useful because of its ability to make a consistent wound on the rats involved in the study. Seven days after the injury, the rats were then injected with 40,000 neural stem cells (NSCs) at ten different sites, for a total of 400,000 NSCs per animal. Behavioral testing was used to analyze the effectiveness of the treatment with the use of a neurological severity score, a rotarod, a balance beam, a Morris water maze, and a foot fault.
They found that 1.4-1.9% of the infused cells stayed in the neural tissue 48 hours and 2 weeks post-injection. It was confirmed that the NSCs were nestin positive, which is a protein found mostly in neurons when they are implicated in the radical growth of the axon. Rotatod motor testing revealed significant increases in maximal speed among NSC-treated rats compared with the saline controls at day 4. The other motor, as well as early and late cognitive evaluations revealed no significant differences compared to the saline controls. Most of the data of this experiment is displayed in graphs to show the difference between the sham rats, the NSC rats, and the saline solution rats. The “differences in behavioral testing were assessed by repeated measures analysis of variance with post-hoc Tukey-Kramer analysis. All data are shown as mean +/- SEM.” The Tukey-Kramer method is a single-step multiple comparison procedure and statistical test. It is used to find means that are significantly different from each other.
Harting, Sloan, Jimenez, Baumgartner, & Cox. (2009). Subacute Neural Stem Cell Therapy for Traumatic Brain Injury. Journal of Surgical Research, 153(2), 188-194.
