Authors: Amber Brooks
Mentors: Michelle Schober
Insitution: University of Utah
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) can cause death or result in long-term disabilities. TBIs are the leading cause of death and disability due to trauma and the leading cause of acquired neurological disability in children. At present, medical treatment using supportive and specific therapies to optimize recovery are lacking. Docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), a component of fish oil and a natural constituent of brain cell membranes, is a potential candidate therapy to improve neurologic recovery after severe TBI. The objective of our project is to test the hypothesis that DHA improves cognitive outcome and brain imaging in a male rat model of pediatric TBI, controlled cortical impact (CCI) in male rat pups. Seventeen-day-old male rat pups received CCI or a minimally invasive (SHAM) surgery. Half of the CCI and SHAM rats were fed a DHA diet for 60 days before experiments began. Learning was tested using a Morris Water Maze (MWM) experiment and memory was tested using a Novel Object Recognition (NOR) experiment. Brain injury assessment was accomplished using T2 and DTI magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The T2 MRI scans were used to measure the volume of the hippocampus, the center for learning and memory, and to lesion volume, to assess loss of hemisphere volume. The DTI MRI scans were used to observe the injury to the white matter of the brain. Based on preliminary findings, we anticipate that the results of the study will not support our hypothesis and that DHA will have no beneficial effects on improving cognitive outcomes and brain imaging.