I have just started using the intraluminal transient MCAO (30min) method in c57BL6 mice. I am thinking of including rotarod testing in my experiments, but have some questions about the protocol. In a paper "Assessing post-stroke behavior in mouse models of focal ischemia" from M. Balkaya et al (2013) they emphasis that pre operative training is important, but they also mention that "if mice are left untrained for several days their score will decline". How often do you need to, or can you test the mice after the surgery? As I understand it, this is most often used for short-term evaluation, but in mentioned paper they say that a difference could be seen as late as 28 days post surgery. Would the results be reliable if the mice were tested once a week (average of 3 trials per time point) for a 4 week period?
Hi,
I had been working with this test for 5 years. Idealy, train the animals during 1 week pre-stroke. How to train them? There may be different approaches. In my experience (assuming I train them for three days), the first two days I place the mice in the Rod repeatedly. They fall, and I place them again immediately. After a while I give them a break, and then again. They must learn that dropping off the rod doesn't mean having a break. In the ideal scenario, on the third day, the mice should exceed 250 seconds. I recommend that you include in the experiment only those mice that pass this time. There are very bad mice, which never learn and do not provide reliable data. Now, in my experience, rotarod is not a good test to discriminate long-term damage if the injury is as small as yours (30 min). Secondly, you will see mice that are neurologically worse than others (barrel rolling for example), but they will last longer in the rotarod than much healthier animals. From my point of view, the rotarod can be a complementary test, but never the main one because it won't give you reliable data (especially with such small lesions). Rod time is an unpredictable variable that does not reflect the neurological state of the animals. There is a paper (that I couldn't find) where they show a protocol to evaluate the rotarod by video and explore other issues like posture, hand position, etc. If you want a complete and reliable evaluation, you should use this type of approach, not just time.
On the other hand, I recommend you this: Article MouseMove: An open source program for semi-automated analysi...
Is a better approach.
Regards,
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