The Study Of Pathology And Imaging Of Glial Scar In Experimental Spinal Cord Injury

Glial scar is one of the important characters of chronic spinal cord injury (SCI). They play a key role in the failure regeneration of axon after spinal cord injury. Reactive gliosis is one of the important changes in chronic period. The development of the SCI which eventually leaves a huge lesion composed of large cysts that are totally walled off by a dense network of astrocytic processes (i.e., reactive astrocyte ). The astrocyte response to injury is referred to as reactive gliosis. Astrocytes comprise a large part of the glial scar, and they have two roles to injuryed spinal cord. First, they seclude the injury site from healthy tissue, preventing a cascading wave of uncontrolled delayed injury. The second, they impeded the axonal regeneration. How to estimate the opportunity and confines of removing glial scar are difficult to neurosurgeon. There are not appropriate methods to remove the glial scar and not detail about the spatial distributing of glial scar in previous reports. In our experimental, the contusion SCI in rat and dog was made to observe the pathology and imaging changes, the characters of the glial scar post-injury. The objective of this experiment were to provide the experimental evidence for removing the glial scar.Materials and methods:1 Adult healthy mongrel dogs in Chongqing, both female and male, each injuryed dog received 450 gcf on its T8 level with modified Allen's impactor. Adult female Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats received 150 gcf on its spinal cord at T8. Pathological study, assessment of locomotion, imaging and electrophysiology analysis, immunohistochenistry and immunofluorescence staining was used. Spinal cords were sagittalyy sectioned on a cryostat set and serial 20-μm-thick sections through the entire injury site were cut on a cryostat and mounted sequentially on gelatin-covered slides. Every spinal cord was cut 100 and mounted in 10 slides. Each set containing serial sections spaced 200μm apart. Every sections include the spinal cord injury site and adjacent tissue. Using light microscope and fluorescence microscope, all sections were photoed and images were united. The formation and location of glial scar and the interrelationship between the axon and astrocytes was observed.2 Time- and region-dependent alterations of nestin (as an immunohistochemical...