TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2012//
TI  - The Effect of Injury Severity on Behavior: A phenotypic study of cognitive and emotional deficits after mild, moderate and severe controlled cortical impact injury in mice
JO  - Journal of neurotrauma
A1  - Washington, Patricia M.
A1  - Forcelli, Patrick A.
A1  - Wilkins, Tiffany
A1  - Zapple, David
A1  - Parsadanian, Maia
A1  - Burns, Mark P.
SP  - 2283
EP  - 2296
VL  - 29
IS  - 13
N2  - Traumatic brain injury (TBI) can cause a broad array of behavioral problems including cognitive and emotional deficits. Human studies comparing neurobehavioral outcome after TBI suggest that cognitive impairments increase with injury severity, but emotional problems such as anxiety and depression do not. To determine whether cognitive and emotional impairments increase as a function of injury severity we exposed mice to sham, mild, moderate or severe controlled cortical impact (CCI) and evaluated performance in a variety of neurobehavioral tests in the same animals before assessing lesion volume as a histological measure of injury severity. Increasing cortical impact depth successfully produced lesions of increasing severity in our model. We found that cognitive impairments in the Morris water maze increased with injury severity, as did the degree of contralateral torso flexion, a measure of unilateral striatal damage. TBI also caused deficits in emotional behavior as quantified in the forced swim test, elevated plus maze and prepulse inhibition of acoustic startle - but these deficits were not dependent on injury severity. Stepwise regression analyses revealed that Morris water maze performance and torso flexion predicted the majority of the variability in lesion volume. In summary, we find that cognitive deficits increase in relation to injury severity, but emotional deficits do not. Our data suggest the threshold for emotional changes after experimental TBI is low, with no variation in behavioral deficits between mild and severe brain injury.<p />  <p>Language: en</p>
LA  - en
SN  - 0897-7151
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1089/neu.2012.2456
ID  - ref1
ER  -