BEHAVIORAL DEFICITS FOLLOWING EXPERIMENTAL SUBARACHNOID HEMORRHAGE INTHE RAT

To characterize some of the short-term and long-term functional conseq uences of subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) in rats, we employed a battery of well-characterized tests for assessment of acute and chronic behav ioral and neurologic performances. Three groups of 10 rats (blood inje cted, mock CSF injected and sham-operated controls) were studied. Duri ng the acute stage, simple nonpostural somatomotor reflexes (pinna and corneal reflexes), simple postural responses (paw flexion, tail flexi on, and head support), startle response, and postural functions (right ing reflex) did not differ significantly between the experimental grou ps. Assessments of body weight, beam walking ability, and beam balanci ng revealed significant disturbances in blood-injected rats. This work demonstrates that this single-hemorrhage rodent model of SAH is assoc iated with the induction of enduring neurologic and behavioral deficit s. Because of the significant interspecies difference, a direct extrap olation of our results to humans may not be appropriate. However, we s uggest that the observed behavioral and neurologic changes may paralle l those seen in humans after SAH. Results reported here further confir m the rat model of SAH as a viable laboratory instrument for the study of the pathophysiology of SAH and provide normative values for the ev aluation of new treatment modalities.