Journal
JOVE-JOURNAL OF VISUALIZED EXPERIMENTS
Volume -, Issue 95, Pages -Publisher
JOURNAL OF VISUALIZED EXPERIMENTS
DOI: 10.3791/50149
Keywords
Medicine; Issue 95; spine; vertebra; vertebrae; spinal cord injury; model; stabilization
Categories
Funding
- National Institutes of Health [NS36350, NS52290, NS50243]
- Mari Hulman George Endowment Fund
- State of Indiana
- Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) [1F31NS071863]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Clinically-relevant animal cervical spinal cord injury (SCI) models are essential for developing and testing potential therapies; however, producing reliable cervical SCI is difficult due to lack of satisfactory methods of vertebral stabilization. The conventional method to stabilize the spine is to suspend the rostral and caudal cervical spine via clamps attached to cervical spinous processes. However, this method of stabilization fails to prevent tissue yielding during the contusion as the cervical spinal processes are too short to be effectively secured by the clamps (Figure 1). Here we introduce a new method to completely stabilize the cervical vertebra at the same level of the impact injury. This method effectively minimizes movement of the spinal column at the site of impact, which greatly improves the production of consistent SCIs. We provide visual description of the equipment (Figure 2-4), methods, and a step-by-step protocol for the stabilization of the cervical 5 vertebra (C5) of adult rats, to perform laminectomy (Figure 5) and produce a contusive SCI thereafter. Although we only demonstrate a cervical hemi-contusion using the NYU/MASCIS impactor device, this vertebral stabilization technique can be applied to other regions of the spinal cord, or be adapted to other SCI devices. Improving spinal cord exposure and fixation through vertebral stabilization may be valuable for producing consistent and reliable injuries to the spinal cord. This vertebral stabilization method can also be used for stereotactic injections of cells and tracers, and for imaging using two-photon microscopy in various neurobiological studies.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available