2022 Undergraduate Research Symposium

Winners ðŸ†: Mohammed Sarray (neuroscience), Malik Jawad (neuroscience)

Faculty mentor: Jean Peduzzi-Nelson

Abstract

The CDC reports that brain injury is a major cause of death and disability in the United States. Hypoxia that is common following brain injury results in worse outcomes. Visual deficits are frequent in people with brain injury and the occurrence of visual problems after brain injury is often underestimated. Our goal is to determine the extent of functional visual deficits in a rat model of traumatic brain and hypoxia.

Adult inbred Lewis RNU (n=7) were tested before and after the brain injury and hypoxia. The Marmarou brain injury model was used followed by 30 minutes of hypoxia. Rats are evaluated weekly using the following tests: Landing Foot Splay, Object Recognition, and Visual Cliff. In the Landing Foot Splay, the rat is dropped one foot after staining footpads with dye and distance between the hind paws is measured. For the Object Recognition Test, the rat is placed in a container with 4 objects. Later one of the objects is replaced by an unfamiliar object.

A normal rat will spend more time with the novel object. In the Visual Cliff Test, rats are placed on clear stage and given the option to leave the stage with a small drop or an illusory large cliff with a checkerboard pattern. Normal rats avoid the large cliff. All rats survived the head injury and hypoxia. The distance between hind paws in Landing Foot Splay increased by 28 to 49% in seven weeks after injury in all rats. The time that the rats took to recognize the novel object increased from 26 to 77% in all rats in the seven weeks after injury.

In the Visual Cliff test, deficits were prominent in the first week after injury. This project sets the stage for our next study in which olfactory stem cells delivered intranasally are evaluated as a treatment for the visual deficits.

Poster pitch

Poster

Rate this presentation

↠Return to symposium