Visual Dysfunction after Repetitive Mild Traumatic Brain Injury in a Mouse Model and Ramifications on Behavioral Metrics.

Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) is a major cause of morbidity and mortality with a poorly understood pathophysiology. Animal models have been increasingly utilized to better understand mTBI and recent research has identified visual deficits in these models that correspond to human literature. While visual impairment is being further characterized within TBI, the implications of impaired vision on behavioral tasks commonly utilized in animal models has not been well described thus far.

Increase in Seizure Susceptibility After Repetitive Concussion Results from Oxidative Stress, Parvalbumin-Positive Interneuron Dysfunction and Biphasic Increases in Glutamate/GABA Ratio.

Chronic symptoms indicating excess cortical excitability follow mild traumatic brain injury, particularly repetitive mild traumatic brain injury (rmTBI). Yet mechanisms underlying post-traumatic excitation/inhibition (E/I) ratio abnormalities may differ between the early and late post-traumatic phases. We therefore measured seizure threshold and cortical gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) and glutamate (Glu) concentrations, 1 and 6 weeks after rmTBI in mice.

Internal Jugular Vein Compression Collar Mitigates Histopathological Alterations after Closed Head Rotational Head Impact in Swine: A Pilot Study.

Recently, there has been increased concern about microstructural brain changes after head trauma. Clinical studies have investigated a neck collar that applies gentle bilateral jugular vein compression, designed to increase intracranial blood volume and brain stiffness during head trauma, which neuroimaging has shown to result in a reduction in brain microstructural alterations after a season of American football and soccer. Here, we utilized a swine model of mild traumatic brain injury to investigate the effects of internal jugular vein (IJV) compression on histopathological outcomes after injury.

Automated Quantification of Immunohistochemical Staining of Large Animal Brain Tissue Using QuPath Software.

Large scale unbiased quantification of immunohistochemistry (IHC) is time consuming, expensive, and/or limited in scope. Heterogeneous tissue types such as brain tissue have presented a further challenge to the development of automated analysis, as differing cellular morphologies result in either limited applicability or require large amounts of training tissue for machine-learning methods. Here we present the use of QuPath, a free and open source software, to quantify whole-brain sections stained with the immunohistochemical markers IBA1 and AT8, for microglia and phosphorylated tau respectively.