Efeito do treinamento motor sobre a recuperação funcional após ismequemia cerebral em ratos

Abstract

Cerebral ischemia resulting from artery occlusion leads to neuronal cell death and eventually causes neurological impairments. The goal of this work was to study the effect of the motor training on functional recovery and infarction region after cerebral ischemia in rats. Stroke was induced by a 1 hour middle cerebral artery occlusion using an intraluminal filament. Adult male Wistar rats were divided into four groups: sham/sedentary, sham/exerc ise, ischemia/sedentary, and ischemia/exercise. Motor training of exercise groups consisted ofsham animals running at a speed of 15m/min and ischemic animals running at a speed of 3m/min. Animals from the four groups were examined with three different motor tests (open field, passo em falso and parallel bar) before (0 day) and at 10 and 31 days after surgery in order to quantify functional recovery. Open field assesses spontaneous exploratory activity, the footfault test measures the precise grip and placement of the forelimbs and the parallel bar measures the precise grip and placement of the hind limbs. Infarction was calculated bydividing the areas of the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere of sequential cerebral coronal cuts. The ischemia/exercise group showed higher body weight than the group ischemia/sedentary. Cerebral injury and motor training did not change the spontaneous exploratory activity of the animals. Animals from the ischemia/sedentary group showedspontaneous motor recovery of the forelimb. Animals from the schemia/exercise group showed motor recovery of the forelimb and hindlimb induced by motor training. The infarction area in the ischemia/exercise group was lower than in the ischemia/sedentary group. In conclusion, motor training after cerebral injury induced functional recovery and reduced the infarction area in Wistar rats.