Abstract
Excitotoxic neuronal death is thought to be a fundamental process in stroke and traumatic brain injury. In the present study, we examined effects of visual input on the recovery of visual cortex following excitotoxic lesion. Adult male Long Evans rats, aged postnatal days 84 to 277, received small injections of ibotenic acid in bilateral primary visual cortex with or without binocular eye enucleation. After survival period of 7 days, the rats were perfused with fixative and cortical sections including the lesioned area were prepared. The extent of lesioned areas was determined by nissl staining. Neighboring sections were stained with antibodies to an immediate early gene, zif268 to evaluate recovery of neural activity in the lesioned area. We found that maximum size of the lesion tended to be larger in eye-enucleated group than that in normal eye group. In addition, the expression of zif268 remarkably decreased around the lesioned area in the eye-enucleated group. These results suggest that neural activity caused by visual inputs might prevent an expansion of cortical lesion in acute phase and facilitate functional recovery from brain damage. [J Physiol Sci. 2008;58 Suppl:S171]
