ORIGINAL ARTICLES   

Journal of Neurosurgical Sciences 2003 June;47(2):89-94

Copyright © 2004 EDIZIONI MINERVA MEDICA

lingua: Inglese

Role of inflammation in the secondary injury following experimental spinal cord trauma

Conti A. ¹, Cardali S. ¹, Genovese T. ², Di Paola R. ², La Rosa G. ¹

¹ Neurosurgical Clinic, University of Messina School of Medicine, Messina, Italy 2 Institute of Pharmacology, University of Messina School of Medicine, Messina, Italy

Aim. The pri­mary trau­mat­ic mechan­i­cal inju­ry to the spi­nal ­cord caus­es the ­death of a num­ber of neu­rons ­that can­not be recov­ered, nei­ther regen­er­at­ed. However, neu­rons con­tin­ue to die for ­hours ­after spi­nal ­cord inju­ry (SCI), and ­this rep­re­sents a poten­tial­ly avoid­a­ble ­event. One of mech­a­nisms ­that ­have ­been tout­ed to con­trib­ute impor­tant­ly to the evo­lu­tion of ­such sec­on­dary ­cell ­death is the ­local inflam­ma­to­ry ­response in the ­injured spi­nal ­cord. In ­this ­report we ­have ­used an in ­vivo mod­el to ­induce ­acute SCI and repro­duce the ­acute path­o­log­i­cal ­events asso­ciat­ed ­with inflam­ma­tion ­after trau­mat­ic SCI in ­rats.
Methods. Twenty-two ­adult ­male Sprague-Dawley ­rats ­were ­used in the ­study. SCI was pro­duced by extrad­u­ral ­clip com­pres­sion at T5-T9 lev­el. The ­rats spi­nal ­cord was ana­lysed at 1 ­hour to meas­ure the mal­o­nil­di­al­de­hyde (MDA) lev­els con­sid­ered an ­index of lip­id per­ox­i­da­tion. At 4 hours ­were meas­ured the lev­els of mye­lop­e­rox­i­dase (MPO) activ­ity con­sid­ered as the ­index of leu­ko­cytes activ­ity. Finally the spi­nal ­cord was extract­ed 12 hours ­after the trau­ma to meas­ure the cytop­las­mat­ic lev­els of IκB-α con­sid­ered as the ­index of activ­ity of the tran­scrip­tion­al fac­tor nucle­ar fac­tor-κB (NF-κB).
Results. After the SCI, ­both the lev­els of MDA and MPO ­were sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er com­pared ­with ­naive and ­sham-oper­at­ed ­rats (p=0.01). Western blot­ting anal­y­sis dem­on­strat­ed the dis­ap­pear­ance of IκB-α in the cyto­plasm indi­cat­ing nucle­ar trans­lo­ca­tion of the NF-κB.
Conclusion. The ­study con­firms the ­role of inflam­ma­tion in con­trib­ut­ing to the sec­on­dary inju­ry ­after experi­men­tal SCI in the rat.